Saturday, November 25, 2006
Thanksgiving
It was a great afternoon together. And getting our 15-year service certificate was quite out of the blue. At least for me. Perhaps Jane knew it was coming. What really shocked me were the gifts. I mean, they were wonderful gifts, not the penholders and paperweights that UWM has traditionally done! In fact, as he started to make the presentations, Rodney acknowledged the various "friends" of the Mission who were there, apologizing for doing a very insider thing with them present. He suggested that it might encourage them to join the Mission. At that, I guffawed! I laughed out loud with a kind of bark. And then I quickly covered my mouth as folks at my end of the room stared at me! Oops. I thought Rodney was being sarcastic. I confess that we’ve grumbled in the past about the gifts being so banal as to be the opposite of motivating. You know the corporate grumble, "After all these years of dedication and sacrifice for the company, they give me a gold watch and push me out the door." Well, not the "out the door" part, but we felt like the Mission leaders weren’t even really thinking about us.
But, boy, did they change that. Our gift was a portable DVD player. It is one of those little units that you can take in a car with you. It has a 7-inch screen and a rechargeable battery and a power plug for the cigarette lighter in the car. We were just blown away. What a lovely gift. We really have to write a thank-you to our leadership team, including Rodney. We really did feel honored this time.
(I’d show you a photo of the DVD player, but the digital camera just went on the fritz. It makes a nice buzzing sound when you turn it on now and can’t do the auto focus. Rats!)
And Gretchen came to the Thanksgiving feast, too! That was wonderful. We sat with "Lizzy" (Ruth Ann) Bowers and the Duttweilers. And Gretchen had on these shoes that I just had to get a shot of. She says they are quite comfortable and are very fashionable here. They are the pointiest things I’ve ever seen. And she is right. They are quite fashionable here for ladies.
The next day, the Conrad gang was gathered at Jim’s house in Monticello, Indiana. Well, Jane’s two brothers and their kids, plus Anna, Frankie, Allison and Christine were there. Beth and her family are in Alaska and we're here. Anyway, we got an urgent call from Steve on our Vonage phone. He was sending an email with a photo attached, he explained. He would call back in fifteen minutes. They were challenging Jane to a game of Boggle. 
"Don’t peek!"
What fun! Jane didn’t win the match. Carol did, as always. But Frankie found "goalie" and "goalies" when no one else did, even though he wasn't officially playing.
Of course, the moral of that last story is that we aren't that far away by telephone and computer! Call us. Send us your photos. Challenge Jane to Boggle, even. We love to hear from you!
