A Life Of Gymspiration

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving. My life had gotten so busy that Thanksgiving kind of sneaked up on me. And the week before it I realized this was the first of the firsts. The first big holiday without Grandpa. And I started to panic. The last 5 years or so we have been spending Thanksgiving with my grandparents. Prior to that we always spent it with my dad's side of the family and a lot of the time, my grandparents would come join us. I'm CONSTANTLY looking into the past. I discovered that AOL doesn't delete any e-mail, so rather than working one day, I started going through old e-mails from my Grandpa.   It's weird how just the mundane things that you don't even realize are traditions become the things that you really miss and wish you could do again.  The Friday before Thanksgiving I came down with the stomach flu and called in sick to work for the 2nd time in my life. I actually was still going to try to go to work until I vomited my br...

Happy Veteran's Day. A little background. For years (we think about 30 or so?) my grandpa has helped with the Veteran's Day Service at the Veterans Home in Florence. My family has always gone to it, though I could never take time off work to go. :( This year I decided I needed to take time off to be with my family and go to the service. A few weeks ago my Aunt Laura called me and told me that she had contacted the Veteran's Home and asked if someone from the family could step in for my grandpa and that she wanted to ask me to do it. I thought about it and decided to do it. So my task was this: To write and give the invocation, help read names of the veterans who had passed in the last year, and also write and give the benediction. I was nervous but hoped my grandpa would help guide me. I had kind of formed a few things in my head, but hadn't really written it and decided the perfect place to do that would be my grandpa's desk (where I am sitting now actually)....