The examen

You know that practice where you review the day and lift up the good and the bad, and ask God to bless them both (my extremely loose description of what is actually a profound and ancient Jesuit practice)?

Well, tonight I was lifting up the bad, with Jeff as my witness.

Bad
Today I was:

...in a fender bender. Not my fault for once, and no damage to me and just a scratch on the car, but it happened at a place where I actually could not stop the car at all, so I did not get out and Obtain The Other Driver's Insurance Information, which I surely should have tried harder to do.

...ineffectual at my work. A dear, old soul takes her final breaths tonight and my prayers were like straw. Another soul struggled and my words fell on rocky ground.

...witness to neighbor uncomfortableness, and possibly party to it, when one of the Yard Apes (Jeff's name for the tiny gang of tweeners that hangs out on our street all summer) knocked another one off his bike, leaving him crying that his leg was broken in front of our house. I'm no paramedic, but I brought him ice and a blanket while we waited for his dad to come, and assured him that I was pretty sure that his leg wasn't broken, which it wasn't. When the parents of the knocker and the knockee arrived, it all got really tense - no open hostility but none of the "hey, boys will be boys" banter I was kind of expecting either. So I tried to lighten the whole scene with some jocularity that did not go over at all.

Good
As I reviewing this day, Jeff reminded me, "Yeah, but you got a really great Halloween costume for your son." Which is true - the shiny, red fireman's coat and hat (and fire extinquisher! that does not, as promised, squirt real water but is still cool!) that we picked out together today is so much better for our straightforward little macho man than that Batman outfit he's been asking for. Before we could even buy it, he took it out of the package and wore it to the cash register, where he announced to the Joanne's cashier that he "look just great in my new fire fighter costume," and she, bless her heart, agreed without any of the syrupy goo strangers sometimes pour on kids when they're being precosiouly (yikes, spelling?) cute.

Besides a just-right Halloween costume, I remembered the day's other blessings:

I made this and although I'm usually not all that great a baker (just cannot be bothered with all that exact measuring and am known to throw in a handful or two when a cup is called for), these turned out incredibly kick ass. Of course, it's hard to go wrong with a recipe that contains the line "we reduced the butter to 7 tablespoons, but still managed to retain the delicious...." (Almost a whole stick of butter! Oh, just throw the extra tablespoon in there while you're at it.)

I got to go walking at night. This is probably another post, really, but I'm actually scared of the dark, so now that I have a dog, getting to walk around at night under the stars is just awesome, in the original sense of that word, as well as the 80's sense.