Roses from my garden.

Take this day one day at a time!

IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER – by Erma Bombeck (written after she found out she was dying from cancer).

~ When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom. Proverbs 11:2

                                                        

~ A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW drove up out of a cloud of dust towards him.

The driver, a man in a fancy suit and tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"

Bud looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The man parks his car, whips out his smart phone surfs the web to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany

Within seconds, he receives an email on his smart phone that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his i phone and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized apple Laser-jet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud.

He watches the guy select one of the animals and looks on amused as he stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the Cowboy Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy.

"You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd of sheep.
Now give me back my dog"

~ When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.
Proverbs 11:2

Art by, Steve Devenyns

*God bless and keep sharing the Good News !!! ~ C4C

Cinnamon Muffins

INGREDIENTS

½ cup butter, softened

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup milk plus 1 tablespoon vinegar or just use regular milk)

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

Cinnamon/Sugar Mixture:

⅓ cup sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat oven to 350 F. degrees, grease a muffin tin.

Hand mix ingredients together, be careful to not over mix the batter. Cream butter, sugar, vanilla, and egg together. Add milk, flour, & baking soda & until combined.

In a separate bowl mix ⅓ cup sugar and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon together to create the cinnamon/sugar mixture.

Pour muffin tins half full of batter. Then sprinkle with cinnamon/sugar mixture. Add more batter to fill almost to the top of muffin pan. Then sprinkle tops with remaining cinnamon/sugar mix.

Swirl batter around using a toothpick in the muffin cups.

Bake at 350 F. degrees for 20-25 min. or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Let cool for a few minutes in pan then move to cooling rack.

You have what it takes to be successful. Go for it and make a difference

                                                   

At age 88 Colonel Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Empire was a billionaire.

At age 5 his father died.
At age 16 he quit school.
At age 17 he had already lost four jobs.
At age 18 he got married.
Between ages 18 and 22, he was a railroad conductor and failed.
He joined the army and washed out there.
He applied for law school, he was rejected.
He became an insurance sales man and failed again.
At age 19 he became a father.
At age 20 his wife left him and took their baby daughter.
He became a cook and dishwasher in a small cafe.
He failed in an attempt to kidnap his own daughter, and eventually he convinced his wife to return home.
At age 65 he retired.
On the 1st day of retirement he received a check from the Government for $105.
He felt that the Government was saying that he couldn’t provide for himself.
He decided to commit suicide, life wasn’t worth living anymore; he had failed so much.
He sat under a tree writing his will, but instead, he wrote what he would have accomplished with his life. He realized there was much more that he hadn’t yet done. There was one thing he could do better than anyone he knew. And that was how to cook.
So he borrowed $87 against his check and bought and fried up some chicken using his recipe, and went door to door to sell them to his neighbors in Kentucky.
Remember, at age 65 he was ready to commit suicide.
But at age 88 Colonel Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Empire was a billionaire.
Moral of the story: It's never too late to start all over.
MOST IMPORTANLY, IT'S ALL ABOUT YOUR ATTITUDE. NEVER GIVE UP NO MATTER HOW HARD IT GETS.
You have what it takes to be successful. Go for it and make a difference.

#kygirl #dontgiveup #jump — em Owensboro.

A Little Kindness Goes a Long Way;

                                                      

The day my father died, I was at the grocery store buying bananas.

I remember thinking to myself, “This is insane. Your dad just died. Why the hell are you buying bananas?”

But we needed bananas. We’d be waking up for breakfast tomorrow morning, and there wouldn’t be any bananas—so there I was.

And lots of other stuff still needed doing too, so over the coming days I would navigate parking lots, wait in restaurant lines, and sit on park benches; pushing back tears, fighting to stay upright, and in general always being seconds from a total, blubbering, room-clearing freak out.

I wanted to wear a sign that said: I JUST LOST MY DAD. PLEASE GO EASY.

Unless anyone passing by looked deeply into my bloodshot eyes or noticed the occasional break in my voice and thought enough to ask, it’s not like they’d have known what’s happening inside me or around me. They wouldn’t have had any idea of the gaping sinkhole that had just opened up and swallowed the normal life of the guy next to them in the produce section.

And while I didn’t want to physically wear my actual circumstances on my chest, it probably would have caused people around me to give me space or speak softer or move more carefully—and it might have made the impossible, almost bearable.

Everyone around you; the people you share the grocery store line with, pass in traffic, sit next to at work, encounter on social media, and see across the kitchen table—they’re all experiencing the collateral damage of living. They are all grieving someone, missing someone, worried about someone. Their marriages are crumbling or their mortgage payment is late or they’re waiting on their child’s test results, or they’re getting bananas five years after a death and still pushing back tears because the loss feels as real as it did that first day.

Every single human being you pass by today is fighting to find peace and to push back fear; to get through their daily tasks without breaking down in front of the bananas or in the carpool line or at the post office.

Maybe they aren’t mourning the sudden, tragic passing of a parent, but wounded, exhausted, pain-ravaged people are everywhere, everyday stumbling all around us—and yet most of the time we’re fairly oblivious to them:

Parents whose children are terminally ill.
Couples in the middle of divorce.
People grieving loss of loved ones and relationships.
Kids being bullied at school.
Teenagers who want to end their lives.
People marking the anniversary of a death.
Parents worried about their depressed teenager.
Spouses whose partners are deployed in combat.
Families with no idea how to keep the lights on.
Single parents with little help and little sleep.

Everyone is grieving and worried and fearful, and yet none of them wear the signs, none of them have labels, and none of them come with written warnings reading, I’M STRUGGLING. BE NICE TO ME.

And since they don’t, it’s up to you and me to look more closely and more deeply at everyone around us: at work or at the gas station or in the produce section, and to never assume they aren’t all just hanging by a thread. Because most people are hanging by a thread—and our simple kindness can be that thread.

We need to remind ourselves just how hard the hidden stories around us might be, and to approach each person as a delicate, breakable, invaluable treasure—and to handle them with care.

As you make your way through the world today, people won’t be wearing signs to announce their mourning or to alert you to the attrition or to broadcast how terrified they are—but if you look with the right eyes, you’ll see the signs.

There are grieving people all around you.

Go easy.

- John Pavlovitz

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