1. For the next few days, I’m the semi-proud driver of a Volvo. It was the smallest rental car available. Simon Bennett, the victim of a (very minor) sideswipe last week, is having his scratches and dents repaired courtesy of Liberty Mutual. I already miss him and his cute checkerboard top and his manual transmission – I really wish all American rentals weren’t automatically automatics.

2. For one of the funniest posts I’ve read in a long time, visit my friend’s weblog. (It’s short. And hilarious.)

3. A friend of mine is involved in a 10 Days to 10 Million project, seeking to share love with as many people as possible in the days between now and Thanksgiving. According to the website, one in three people currently feels some kind of sadness or anxiety – in other words, a third of the population needs to know that they’re loved and cared about. Given my own 23+ year battle with depression, I know how much a quick note or call to someone can mean. So, visit the site, watch the 3:45 film, read the text, and then let someone know you care.

That’s the sound of my head hitting my desk. Again.

You see, for the second time in as many months, I have left a pot on the stove until all the water boiled out and the pot was ruined. This time, the pot in question even caught fire. I was reminded of my would-be lunch when the smoke alarm commenced its piercing cries.

I actually remember thinking today as I turned on the stove that I hate having one of those “you-can-tell-she’s-been-cooking-when-you-hear-the-smoke-alarm” reputations, but had to acknowledge, even then, that it’s a reputation well deserved. I shouldn’t be allowed to leave the kitchen when something is cooking. Or enter it in the first place.

Anyone want to become my personal chef?

Using a recent journal entry as a post today:

I was reading the testimonies of the Three and Eight Witnesses on Thursday and started thinking about that place where earth and heaven intersect. I was thinking about how it bugs me sometimes that God seems to choose such prosaic ways of accomplishing His work – that I want the plates to be carried around in a shining silver box in some kind of constantly illuminated celestial carriage, instead of shoved in a sack and buried under a hearthstone. I want everything related to God’s work to be obviously imbued with the celestial. But what occurred to me as I read is that maybe God’s work is imbued with the celestial – that I need to learn to see the divine in things that seem humdrum and everyday, because really nothing in this world is humdrum or everyday – and neither are people.