The weather outside is frightful! My basement is not delightful.

Thursday January 3rd 2008

Brrr...man is it cold outside. Windchill of 5 degrees today and it will continue to drop on Friday.

Jewel was up bright and early to start school again. Daniel was off to work for his 11:00 meeting. He is still doing some training and identifying his job assignments. Dakota and I delivered documents (to support his Rutgers application) to Nancy Pullen and Bill Russo. It turned out to be an interview and chat for half an hour. Dakota has to finalize his essay and hit the send button on the form. I also mailed the petition to the Board of Ed in Trenton to see if Dakota will be issued a high school diploma/GED.

Daniel has a Stake presidency meeting tonight, but is coming home early. Jewel called him as our pipes clogged and flooded out basement again. This is the third time in two weeks that this has happened and I am thinking strongly about moving to Piscataway.

Trivia for the day...2nd Friendship Baptist Church on 122nd and 7th avenue in Harlem burned down tonight. This was the church my parents were married in December 8th 1957. No one was inside.

I was listening to Jill Scott singing a Billy Holiday song 'Good Morning Heartache' and began thinking about the stories Alvin Ailey told me about Billy Holiday and his first time watching her perform. John Butler choreographed a piece called 'Portrait of Billie'. Funny thing as Martin Luther King's birthday approaches...I was thinking about the Fox Theatre in Atlanta GA when I was about to go onstage to perform Talley Beatty's 'The Stack Up'. I saw Coretta Scott King sitting with Alvin and I asked for her autograph. This was sometime in 1983 0r 1984. She looked just like all her photos. I wished I had saved the Playbill she signed. sigh! Her oldest daughter died this year. She was only in her 50's.

Today would have been Hester Blanding's (my grandama) 90th birthday. She was buried the same day that Dakota was born.

Gratitude thought: grateful for a husband who happens to be in town when the basement floods. I could have been here alone with the kids.

grateful that Daniel snaked the pipes and came home early to do so.

...... after bleaching, cleaning and taking out 8 bags of damaged items, I am very grateful that I can go to bed at 12:15 am.

grateful for scriptures to read to put an evening like this into perspective!