A Thanksgiving Moment

I went to Justin's mom's house for Thanksgiving this year. It was my first ever visit to Walterboro, SC and I was pretty excited. I was looking forward to all the spectacular "redneck" stuff Justin promised me Walterboro would bring. He showed me around the great little area of Hendersonville, SC and pointed out all his haunts from when he was a kid. I looked forward to his mom dragging out the baby books so I could ooh and aww over Justin's baby photo's. I even expected there to be some exercising of our 2nd amendment rights (and BTW, did you buy a gun on friday or saturday? B/C in SC guns were tax free).

I DID NOT expect to share my Thanksgiving dinner with the stinkbugs however!!!

There I was sitting at the dinner table enjoying my turkey dinner and headed down the road to a food coma, when out of the corner of my eye I see this gray insect crawling along the table cloth below my mounds of food on my plate!!! I freaked out only a little bit... ok, I really screamed and shoved my chair back (into the china cabinet) trying to get away from the little freak. Once I realized the stink bug had me cornered (because I could push my chair that far), I got out of there and ran into the living room. and proceeded to giggle furiously at my hysterical overreaction to this little bug. Eventually everyone (myself, mainly) calmed back down after the stink bug was removed from the premises, and we proceeded to finish dinner. Later Justin's brother's fiance thanked me for the bit of excitement and distraction from talking about her wedding details. All in all, totally a Turkey Day worth remembering! Let's hope next year it's just guns on Thanksgiving, not bugs!

Thankful Wednesday

Today has shown me:

1) I'm thankful for indoor plumbing. The water got turned off at work. I definitly take indoor plumbing for granted.

2) The internet. It is also going to be turned off at work (at least to some degree) today.

3) My education. You can't take it away from me, hah!

Have a great, and thankful, thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving

During the past week, I feel like I've hit a brick wall emotionally and financially while going 60 mph.  I'm not one to be a pessimist, and even in times of negativity or challange, I try to find the positive and bright side to things.  So I think these challanges occurred the week before thanksgiving, and right before the kickoff to the holiday season to remind me of how lucky I am and how able I am to be in control of the situation, instead of the situation controlling me. So here's my thankful list:

1. I'm thankful for my job. It enables me to maintain the feeling of being able to control my situation.

2. I'm thankful I have a roof over my head. It's more than a lot of people have this year.

3. I'm thankful for my optimism, intelligence, and education. I'm glad life presents interesting challanges to me to maintain those qualities.

4. Above all, I'm thankful for my life, and the lives of those around me.

What irks me... every now and then

Ok, so for many people who know me, I generally let a lot of stuff people say slide.  I'll admit it, we're all culpable of saying things when we really haven't thought out the implications. One of those things that repeatably gets said around me involves that fact that I look young for my age. I'll admit it, I don't try hard to look older, but I also don't try to look younger than I really am. What are those remarks? They are the unintentional ageist remarks young adults (22+) quite often hear.

I know I'm not alone in hearing "oh, I thought you were a student" or "you really don't look old enough to ___" or the best "really, you're 25?!! Gosh, I thought you were ____ (usually an age in the teens)". I mean, if I were to reverse those comments to be a comment on how old the person looked, it would A) be insulting, and B) imply that I thought that person wasn't equipped to be doing the job or activity they're doing due to their age.

For awhile (like most of my life), I've let these kinds of comments slide. Most women in my family do look younger than they really are and I will consider myself very lucky one day when I'm 45 and feeling like an old hag and someone says I look like I'm in my 20s. But what really set me off onto a path of thinking about ageist comments was an experience someone I knew had at a professional conference.  There's this friend of mine that I encouraged to get presentation experience and she submitted a proposal, which got accepted. She worked long and hard on it, and did a fabulous job. What really irked me was when we were reviewing her presentation feedback forms and some of the comments read "what a great job she did, considering how young she is".  I was flabbergasted!  Age shouldn't have anything to do with how qualified someone is.

Grr it really makes me mad.