Someone conspired against Renaissance_Phoenix, and I had to get in on the fun. Except, I forgot yesterday was Thursday, and wasn't online much to remember the plan, so this is a bit delayed. But it's just as worth it to be thankful on Fridays as on Thursdays.

Anyway, Amanda has a long pattern of writing Thankful Thursday posts on her blog, full of bullet lists of wonderful things she's thankful for. They never fail to be inspiring. And now, I'm going to try my hand at it in honor of her.

I'm thankful for...

• the warm weather that is stubbornly sticking around (sorry, Kelcey, but I do)
• watching meteor showers with my siblings and talking about God. Precious.
• that I'm looking forward to Christmas this year, with a passion. My brain is brimming with plans of lovely, Christmasy things to do
• that I have the pleasure of enjoying the amazingness of kids almost every day because of my job
• that I finally found a job back this summer
• that our God is a healing God, and heals the brokenness of wrong attitudes in my life
• that this year I was finally able to thank Him for something painful that happened years ago, and since thanking Him it no longer haunts me. It has been transformed into a blessing.
• I am thankful for dreams

It took me awhile to fall asleep last night (it always does, but this time even more so), and an hour after I did I was yanked out of a dream. It was weird how quickly it happened--one minute I was dreaming, the next I was wide awake. I had a headache from it all. It felt literally like my brain was a piece of paper that had been ripped in half, and I could feel the jagged edges.

But before I awakened, I had been in a fantasy world where the Nutcracker was a real story and not a ballet, and Johnny Depp played the Nutcracker Prince and was really creepy in an appealing way, and Clara was trapped because he told her she was supposed to be his fairy queen and live in this far away world of dancing candycane kids and beautiful snow faeries, and he was like the Phantom of the Opera seducing her and she kind of liked it, but some part way back inside of her didn't because she knew something was controlling her that wasn't herself. And my dream started to smear in a swirl of color like liquid being funneled into something, and then I was sucked rapidly through a black tunnel away from my dream, down, down down, until I woke up feeling like my brain had ripped in half and part was still in the dream and part was wide awake and had to pee really badly.

I have no idea where The Nutcracker and Johnny Depp came from, but before I had fallen asleep I'd been thinking about love, and a quote I'd heard somewhere that when you love something, you own it. In appreciating a beautiful painting and admiring every tiny aspect of it, you possess it somehow, if only for the moment. There is a queer feeling that someone loves something about you and appreciates it, and thus possesses some small part of your heart that you never gave away.

And now I want to write a children's book about the Nutcracker instead of adding to my NaNoWriMo story, which I probably should be doing at the moment, or at least preserving my fingertips for such purposes, but now I want to get out Christmas stuff and listen to Nutcracker music and write, or even better, make up a story about it for little kids and tell them at bedtime like I did once for some sweet little girls I was babysitting.

Well, there's my recommended dose of randomness for the day...

I feel left out. Next time I'm bringing my life-sized cardboard cut-out man so I can be in on the fun of triple dates, or rather quadruple dates as it would be. Mr. Cardboard's a pretty nice guy. He's one of those strong, silent types, even if his humor often does fall flat...

Maybe I'll take him to the bongo concert too. In the upcoming events section of a local magazine I noticed tucked in between some dull-sounding orchestra things and broadway musicals was a bongo fest sort of thing. I think it sounds awesome. I would love to go to that. Why doesn't anybody want to go to that? I'd rather go to that than listen to classical music that would put you to sleep or lame pop and rock music. I want a man who would take me to a bongo fest and really get into it. It could be so fun, with the right guy...

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?

Forget Romeo.

O Bongo Dude...