A thought for the day...

I don't often do this, but I just had to share this forwarded joke with you:

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make a difference when we give
a child the gift of our time.

A young family moved into a house, next to a vacant lot. One day, a construction crew began
to build a house on the empty lot. The young family's 5-year-old daughter naturally took an
interest in the goings-on and spent much of each day observing the workers.

Eventually the construction crew, all of them 'gems-in-the-rough,' more or less, adopted her
as a kind of project mascot. They chatted with her during coffee and lunch breaks and gave her
little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important. At the end of the first week, they even
presented her with a pay envelope containing ten dollars. The little girl took this home to her
mother who suggested that she take her ten dollars 'pay' she'd received to the bank the next
day to start a savings account.

When the girl and her mom got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little
girl how she had come by her very own pay check at such a young age. The little girl proudly replied,
'I worked last week with a real construction crew building the new house next door to us.'

'Oh my goodness gracious,' said the teller, 'and will you be working on the house again this week, too?'

The little girl replied, 'I will, if those assholes at Home Depot ever deliver the f_ckin' sheet rock.'

Kind of brings a tear to the eye - doesn't it?

Following up on the bra...

This is why I love my doctor -- when I went to him just to check on the condition of my rib injury (heretofore to be known as The Great Victoria's Secret Debacle of 2008), in the short time that I was in his office, we talked more about his ailments than mine. I found out that he has tendinitis in his foot, and the odd thing about that is that he can run without pain, but he can't walk. This amuses him greatly, and he's started referring to himself as Forrest Gump. I also found out that he still has trouble with the tendinitis in his elbow that he had last summer, had to go to physical therapy for it, and is also annoyed because he was having a slow afternoon because he didn't expect the installation of his new computer system to go as quickly as it did.

Somewhere in there, he poked about my rib cage, said that I had a bruised rib, ran through the range of painkillers that could be available to me, and told me when it came to my usual exercise routine, that if it hurts, don't do it. For this, he went to medical school.

No, I'm just kidding. I've been going to him for about 17 years, and these are the traits that make him more endearing. He's the kind of guy you want to take home and make soup for.

I opted for the Tylenol with codeine, (turned out to be a mistake; it kept me awake all night) and he made a promise not to drive after I took it. If I'd only known what my reaction would be, I could have, say, taken third shift at a nuclear power plant.

But I got thinking about his "if it hurts, don't do it" comment. And it makes me feel like I'm being tested. Like something up there or out there in the universe, the thing that's bigger than all of us that we all tap into now and again, wants to see how badly I want to write.

First, like the doctor, I get tendinitis in both elbows last summer, which necessitated my changing the way I write on the computer. While I was in the acute phase, I started using voice-activated software. I got better and could type a little, and then I got sore again. Back to the VAS, and doesn't iti figure that The Great Victoria's Secret Debacle is causing me pain when I talk.

So there you go. I'm going to have to have some scientists devise a way for me to write by using my eyelashes or following the movements of my pupils.

Because nothing is going to stop me. Not a little pain in my elbows, and certainly not an underwire bra.