Road kill

This morning on the way to marking I drove past some road kill that was still alive and twitching. I think it was a eat, maybe a squirrel, I'm not sure.  It completely freaked me out. I can't even talk about it. Writing about it is the only way I can share it.

In that moment when I drove past, and saw it twitching, I realised how 'human' it was, how mortal. I connected with it in some way. I wasn't sure if it just bad a few broken ribs, so was struggling to get up off the road, or if it was in its death throes. Its little back leg was twitching; it looked more deliberate than just death throes though.

I wanted to stop, turn my car around, and go and help it... if nothing else, put it out of its misery. I couldn't bring myself to do it though. I was so freaked out by it, by the continual replay in my head of that little leg twitching.  I found myself crying over it, praying that God would let it die quickly, not make it suffer more.

Not being one to do drugs, I have to rely on the testimony of others, and they tell me that one of the greatest things about drugs is that they enable you to feel one with the world, with all living things, that they enable you to see yourself in everyone and everything else.

Here's hoping I don't have nightmares about it tonight... it's just the sort of thing I would dream about!

Google search failed me! OMW!

Occasionally, there are times when you need to convert from A4 to A5, but NOT just when you print. I recently had a situation where I'd created an A4 document in Publisher, and but I need it in 3 different sizes - A4, A5 and B5. Given that the document was over 300 pages, I REALLY didn't want to have to go through each page and resize the images, etc. to make them fit, for an additional two sizes.

As I usually do when I'm faced with a technological problem, I turned to Google - but this is one time when Google failed me (or maybe I just didn't scroll far enough down through the search results). Everything I found insisted that I needed to download special software to be able to do this.

This is NOT the case!!

As my heart began to sink at the thought of the hours I would have to spend resizing everything, I suddenly thought of this really nifty PDF reader called Foxit. I've been using Foxit for some time now, in preference over Adobe. I realised that if I first printed from Publisher to an A4 PDF, I could then create a 2nd PDF in whatever size I needed, just by selecting the output page size and then scaling the pages to fit correctly on the output page size.

Foxit is AWESOME! Well done to the team at Foxit for making this niggly little problem so easy to solve. They have literally saved me HOURS of work.

The Ultimate Gift

The book by this title, written by Jim Stovall, is a very quick read, but profound in its content; something worth reading slowly and thoughtfully.

Having read it in just over an hour (and thereby failing to follow my own advice), I find myself left pondering which gifts I could benefit from learning more, and how I can teach my kids these gifts.

The ultimate gift is becoming aware of the gifts you already have, and only one of those are material.

Theses are the gifts you need to learn:

The gift of work
The gift of money
The gift of friends
The gift of learning
The gift of problems
The gift of family
The gift of laughter
The gift of dreams
The gift of giving
The gift of gratitude
The gift of a day
The gift of love

What a great list!