Another Christmas...

Merry Christmas. Here we are with another year gone by. Our boys have had a wonderful Christmas as have our girls. Santa came to see David and Max. The Reindeer ate the oatmeal they left out for them. The wooden toy from Santa's workshop was a boat. When the weather gets warm they'll have to go try them out down at the river.

Troubles come...

Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.

Sylacauga isn't immune to bad times any more than any other small town in America right now. Just this week, we lost another 240 jobs in an established printing business. Most of these folks had worked for 20 to 30 years. Some were just months short of retirement. Now all that is lost. Right now I am wondering what the future is for the hospital. We have been told we are $800,000 below budget in the first quarter this year. I don't know how we overcome that. Who knows where we will be in a short time. It begins to cause me worry. Not worry as to how we will make it but the shame for losing all I've worked for.

Pleasing everyone...

And since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764

I invited comment on my latest effort at the bike trail and wasn't too happy with one of them. Our instinct is to react badly to dissent. We struggle to learn to esteem people who disagree with us. It is difficult. And I found myself "hurt" by the disapproval I found in the note. But there again, I invited the comments. There are many adages to retreat into that warn us that we can't expect any better. That we shouldn't take it personally. That we shouldn't assume a malicious intent... It isn't easy to do. By now, I should know better. This isn't that different from the day to day grind in the Retail Drug store. There were always those who didn't appreciate the effort being made on their behalf. It wasn't fast enough. It wasn't cheap enough. It led to a bitterness that persisted for years. I think my turtle shell has thinned to the point that I was easily injured by a well placed jibe. Shame on me.