Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

(Hint: A good way to express that growing fondness in your heart is TO COMMENT! I'm feeling insecure about the size of my blog, people! Shouldn't I have 50 hundred million readers by now?!?! But I digress...)

Okay, I know it's been a while. Let me see where I left off (scrolling down...) Oops! The more I think about it, the more I regret leaving a link to the Gary Puckett's "Young Girl" video as my parting post. BUT there is a story to that song and I promise to get to it soon. I'll leave you hangin' a little while longer though. Basically it's just another busy football season in our household this year. It's nothing new but this blog thang is so I'm not always able to post as frequently as I anticipated. I'd be a gazillionaire if I could invent a computer chip that would keep track of the thoughts in your brain and then post them automatically on your blog. I know what you're thinking "Gazillionaire? Really? I doubt anyone other than you and maybe a handful of nerdy bloggers would want that" but I'm telling you, the government contracts would set me for life. Anywhoo...

So I've had all these fleeting thoughts over the past couple of days that would have made interesting posts but the operative word there is fleeting. I can't remember a dern thing now so I'll have to work off of my last post. Then I promise to post my astounding and incredibly insightful thoughts on UA's last football game so put your bookie on hold until then. (I kid, I kid... don't ever put your bookie on hold)

The banquet Monday night was AWESOME, as expected. It was a fundraiser for a Christian ministry with many branches but it's primary focus is helping men and women kick addictions. There is a house for men, a house for women (including pregnant women), and there is also an emergency shelter for women and children fleeing abuse. This organization also heads up mission trips all over the world throughout the year. Basically they do just about anything they can to reach out to people in the name of Jesus (Their motto quite appropriately is "Putting God's love into action... where the action is at!) We consider it a privilege to in any way be associated with them and look forward to the day when we can do more.

The speaker that night told two stories to illustrate his point of leaving your mark on the world. These are paraphrased of course but the gist goes like this... Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite and made a fortune off of that and other armaments. An erroneous obituary published before his death claiming "the merchant of death is dead" spurred him on to leave a better legacy for his name so he left the bulk of his estate to fund five prestigious awards, including what is known as the Nobel Peace Prize. Good story, right? Well, there's another lady from about the same time period that also made a fortune off of armaments. Her name was Sarah Winchester and her husband's family's company made essentially the first functional repeating rifle (aka "the gun that won the West") Cue the Civil War and now their family is filthy rich. They had one child, a girl who died at about 6 months of age, and then a few years later her husband died of tuberculosis. Understandably , she took these losses quite hard. Not so understandably, she sought the advice of a spiritual medium who told her she was being haunted by the spirits of all those killed by Winchester guns. According to him, they were seeking revenge on her family so she should move and build a house to appease them/confuse them. This is the result. Whatta waste. She was convinced that she would die (at the hands of the spirits I suppose) if construction ever stopped so work continued 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 38 YEARS! I've been fascinated by this story on so many levels (and have read more about it here and here.) First, I'm struck by how many stories there are throughout history of women losing a child and it basically consuming them... modern-day versions: exhibit a and exhibit b). Never underestimate the sting of that kind of loss. But I'm equally struck by the thought of how desperate she was to save her own life and how it didn't have to be that way. Her story is fascinating to say the least.

Well, it just doesn't seem right to cover the Young Girl video and football in the same post so I'll leave it at that for now. Look for another post veddy, veddy soon though.