Vines, Candles, the Antique Roadshow and Coffee

I told Matt & Alicia to blog about the day-to-day amusements, so here are a few:

Yesterday I got up early as I do every Wednesday to go to our church and teach an ESL class. The ESL class meets at the same time as our Ladies' Bible study - just in a different room. (Once a month I get a replacement to teach ESL and I get to teach the Bible study.) So yesterday, I show up at the church and start setting up for English class and one of the ladies from the Bible study comes into my classroom and hands me a potted plant. "It's a gift," she says. The thing was a huge vine wrapped around some brown furry pole. ?? I couldn't think of anything to say. What are the right words when someone gives you a vine? I think what came out was, "Wow, Margie. Thank you. I'll do my best to keep it alive." Something like that . . . To top it off, Margie looked quite pleased with herself for having given me such a wonderful gift. I've never kept a houseplant alive in my life. Even the avocado pit that I put in water because my friend, Phil, told me it would sprout roots, didn't. It was just a pit perched on toothpicks halfway submerged in water for months. I have a black thumb. Later in the day, I gave the plant away to someone else. :-) I am a classic re-gifter. Beware. (Hey, I kept my promise to do my best to keep it alive. Giving it away was the best chance that plant had!)

A little later, I gave the women in my ESL class a worksheet to work on and left the room to pop my head into the Bible study. The ladies were wrapping shoe boxes for the "Christmas in a Shoebox" charity and filling them with toys and goodies for less fortunate children. They were also working on a project I had given them. I came up with what I thought would be great center pieces for our upcoming International Thanksgiving Dinner. My idea was to take candles, drip some wax onto them and quickly press a fabric leaf onto the wax before it dried. It sounded like a simple, logical way to turn ordinary candles into extraordinary candles. :-) It didn't work. The candles I brought in to use as the melters, turned out to be non-drippers. The women working on the project had a few choice words and "looks" for me when I "checked on them." Lol

After the worksheet on possessive plurals, I showed the ESL class an episode of the Antique's Roadshow that I had downloaded off the internet. That was a hit, especially when they talked about the art of beer stein collecting. :-)

All that to say, despite loving to watch Martha Stewart and HGTV, I didn't exactly end up with my mom's creative gifts and abilities. If you know my mom, she's a gifted gardener, decorator, antique collector and cook. I definitely ended up with my dad's gifts and abilities. I talked to him last night and we love to talk about trends in youth ministry, writing, publishing, teaching, traveling, technology, pursuing our dreams, etc., etc. That stuff, I get. Gardening and crafts . . . not so much. My goal for this month is still to succeed at making an apple pie without water in the bottom. (Don't ask.)

After class, I went out for coffee with one of the women (the proud new owner of "the vine") and drank two HUGE lattes. That I get too. :-)