I feel this need to communicate just how much I enjoy my new job as an instructional technology specialist. It’s almost every day now that this amazing realization pours over me – I must have the greatest job on the planet!

I get to work with new gadgets and software, I pretty much make my own schedule, I still get summers off, I am able to teach children about cool technologies, and I am in the position to make life a little bit easier for a classroom teacher. Sometimes I find myself wanting to shout about how nice of a change this job is. I work hard to control myself, though.

I am truly thankful to the LORD for giving me this opportunity.

I have a really strange feeling that I’ve been there more than once.

It arrives once more

A school year finds its ending

Summer’s warm embrace

It’s so nice be made to feel old by a twelve-year-old with a sweet smile on her face! The typewriter was “resting” in an office at my school. A teacher found it and decided to send it to a more permanent resting place. Only one student in my class knew the correct name of this apparatus.

Happy birthday, Jack. I thought you would like a picture of you and “Silly Girl” on your birthday. I couldn’t find a picture of you and the original “Silly Girl”, so this will have to do. I think this picture was taken just after many local fishermen thought you referred to me as “Honey Bun”.

I hope your day was great!

It’s so nice to know that just when you feel there’s no hope, someone’s got your back.

“Do the chickens have large talons?”

I should have seen it coming. I was just relaxing on an Easter Sunday on a back porch in South Texas. And then it happened. The inevitable. A confetti egg and my head were united. The rest is history. I owe my cousin a cascarone to the head. Maybe next year.

22 is a special number for me. It is the date of my birth. It is the date my first two children were born. It is a palindrome. It was Emmitt Smith’s jersey number. Psalm 22 is one of my favorites. The two digits add to four and the product of them is also 4. In my book, that makes this a special number. I bet I could write for hours about the special place in my mind and heart the number twenty-two occupies. It not only occupies (sounds temporary). The number has permanently taken up residence.

If there were such thing as mental or emotional cattle-branding, my brain would be seared with this number, but it has less to do with the info above, and more to do with what happened exactly twenty-two years ago today, on October 22, 1988.

I met her that day.

And she met me. She met me where I was, and accepted all the baggage, and took my hand. I’m thankful.

These 22 years have been full of sickness and health. They have dished out their fair share of  “better and worse”. For some reason, though, the joy I’ve had surfaces in my thinking, while the pain and frustration with life seem to sink to the bottom of my thoughts. She has a way of putting a fragrance in my life. She challenges me to step up and do the right thing. She moves me to be moved for others. She is slowly helping me to smooth down all of my rough corners. She causes me to be thankful on my knees.

She is my wife.

She is my love.

She is my friend.