The Coyne'r'Butch Christmas Letter 2010 |
Hi, Everyone! It's another Christmas letter from Coyne'r'Butch.
I M Not Ready
I can plan ahead. Honest. Maybe someday I'll plan far enough ahead to actually be able to build a letter and send cards before Christmas instead of after. Ah, but procrastination is so easy. The picture at the left was taken with my webcam, which sits below the monitor.
Counseling
Okay, so I've been doing this counseling, see... Actually, I was shanghaied. They invited me for a little get-together and surprised me with the first session; not long after my trip to the hospital in 2009. (Did I mention that?) Anyway, I'm glad they did. The program is called The Journey and runs through four parts of group counseling. It is aimed at helping a person to better understand themselves and their relationship to other people. It has helped and continues to help me understand certain things that I have misunderstood in the past; things that keep me from having optimum relationships and optimum use of my skills (some of which I'm just discovering). Which brings us to...
2-bits.com
2-bits.com is a site I put together to publish 2 political comics I made. Now, if you'd asked me a year ago if I could draw political comics, I would have said, "Not possible." Counseling has lead me to start re-investigating myself, to find out if some of those personal opinions were, well, not accurately reflected. Now, my first comic wasn't a prize-winner, but it looks like something to me and I was certainly surprised to find out I could do it at all. Maybe I won't continue doing these, we'll see. That wasn't really the point; the point was to see if I could, rather than assuming I couldn't.
Work
I've come full circle at work. When I originally started at Florida Hospital, I worked on the business/purchasing team. In 2003, I moved to a job with the Systems administrators. Later that year, I moved to an Architecture group position. This year, I have moved back to a position with...the business/purchasing team. That team was losing its core technical lead and so they asked me to join the team as a replacement. So here I am. Small world, huh?
Family
Like everyone else my family is struggling.
Hospital
Oh, and yes, I should tell you about my trip to the hospital. It was actually in July 2009, and should have been in last year's letter. Except, of course, I never did a letter last year. Anyway, I caught something (the Doctor thinks) called "undulant fever", from a deer tick bite. It gives you this roller-coaster fever, which goes down almost to normal and then back up to 101 or so; on-and-on. Maybe I'd have recovered. I don't know. What got me into the hospital was dehydration. I wasn't eating much because of the illness (I was in bed for about 12 days before going to the hospital) and became electrolyte-depleted. I was drinking plenty of water, but you can't retain water if your electrolytes are down. I was in the hospital for 3 days, most of the time on saline drip while they tried to normalize my electrolytes. So much for walking through the nature reserves in Florida.
Pink Christmas Tree??
(...and I thought the trees with white, iridescent plastic needles were bad.)
Shattered Glass
This is an excerpt from a message titled "Shattered Glass" sent to us by our campus Chaplain, Lori Engel.
Out in California, a delivery man was taking a beautiful pane of glass to a cathedral.
It was going to be the centerpiece. Unfortunately, there was an accident on the freeway, and
the glass shattered into a million shards. The guy called the designer, who told him not to
move a shard until he got there. When the designer arrived, he carefully picked up every single
shard. In time, he used every shard to create a beautiful glass mosaic in the cathedral. And
through the cracks of the reassembled pieces shone a brilliant radiance that lit up the cathedral
with diamond-drops of light.
God, the designer, is using every broken piece of your life to create something beautiful, more beautiful than it would have been in its wholeness. God won't waste a single shard of pain. He is creating a beautiful mosaic. You may not see the whole picture now, but you will one day in the future. And from another of her messages, a prayer:
Dear Lord, I don’t want to live a me-colored life. Please show me how, through dying to self,
Your brilliant colors can be displayed in me. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Merry Christmas and a Peaceful and Happy New Year. |
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