A compliment is verbal sunshine.

(Robert Orben)

Compliments I've gotten the past coupla days:

Thanks for being transparent/Thanks for sharing that (about being depressed.)

That's a very pretty dress (from a 4 year old girl, so you know it's true!)

I like that dress. I like the dress you wore last week too. When you wear dresses, it makes me think I might like wearing dresses (and she laughs, tugging at her tshirt, which I thought was very cute.)

Oh, you're the one with the laugh. Whenever I hear that laugh, it makes whatever was just said funnier to me. (The same woman gave me these both.)

Yes, that's Sarah Louise, my number one fan. She always laughs at my corny jokes. (BJ made an excellent joke about Al Gore not being alive when Mark wrote his Gospel--this week's text was Mark 13, which is all about the end of the world.) I thought it was so funny, I sort of clapped. BJ said, did you clap because Al Gore wasn't alive? No, said I. I just thought it was so funny.

****

How I love my church. I couldn't stand up for all the songs, and someone I'm trying to get over chanced to sit near me but made it very clear he wasn't interested (which is fine, me neither, but it still hurt a bit, more than I'd like to admit.) We sang a beautiful song, I'm an orphan girl. It was the kind of song that supported my vocal chords--I could really sing out. I'm not an orphan, but I think we often feel we are when we are far from home.

Note to my readers: if you plan to go overseas and your child is seventeen, take them with you. Deferring college for one year would have made a ton of difference in my life. There's a statistic, actually: seventeen year olds go far away for college, eighteen year olds stay closer to home. Well, I wouldn't relive my life. But having my folks on almost the other side of the world (not Australia, you understand) (but 6 time zones is enough) that first year of college wrecked a lot inside me, in ways I'm only now being able to look at empiracly.

(Me: Pittsburgh. They: Poland.) (I knew you'd ask in the comments...)

THAT was a tangent. Ah well, if I'm going to have clean hair, I might as go for it. I'll be bullying Blogger into submission with some more pix either today or tomorrow.

Oh and here's a compliment, just for you: Yins are the best readers I've been blessed with. Thanks for reading.