So Very Thankful

I am back from my Continuing Education seminar. I think I passed my test, which will give me a professional designation, complete with a bunch of random alphabet soup letters behind my name. Aren't you impressed? I thought so. To be honest, I didn't do it for the letters behind my name, I did it for the money I was promised by way of additional compensation if I completed the program. To put it bluntly: I did it for the money.

It will be several weeks before my grades are posted and my completion of the program is official. We'll party then, but for now the important news is that I survived 100 hours of continuing education without murdering anybody or standing up in the middle of a lecture, tearing at my clothes and screaming obscenities. Not that I didn't consider it. Numerous times.

Anyway, one of the most important things I am thankful for this year is that I am FINISHED with this ordeal. Thanks be to God!

I just got off a two hour phone conversation with my mother. I usually talk to her over the weekend, but we missed connections this weekend and we apparently needed to catch up. Tonight, we mainly talked about politics. We agreed on some stuff. In fifty-four years that has never happened before!! At a very minimum, my mother and I haven't agreed on any thing political since before the Vietnam War ended. Turns out that, amazingly, these days my mother and I agree about a lot of things.

The number one thing we agree on is that we are willing embrace a president who seems to have a clue (and care about) civil liberties. We got there by seriously different routes. My mother is basically a Dixiecrat who could probably do a pretty good five minutes on the subject of States Rights, which is something I don't much give a hoot about. I, on the other hand, am a borderline socialist at least in the eyes of most of the people I know. We got there by different routes, but we agree that protecting and defending the Constitution and, in particular, the Bill of Rights is perhaps the most important issue facing our country today. All that other economic, environmental and military stuff is subordinate to the protection of the very most fundamental principals on which our nation was founded.

We had a wonderful conversation that lasted more than two hours. It only occurred to me AFTER we hung up that I didn't wait until after 9:00 p.m. (when our cell plan switched over to 'unlimited calling') to call her. I reckon I'll catch hell about that from DH when we get the next bill. Oh, well....

I tend to write blog posts and read blogs from other people at the same time, so while I was writing this I came across the Mother Letter Project. I am definitely in for that. I'll be working on that in a little while.

I gotta go. I have a letter to write to my mother......