Burn the candles

My mom sent me one of those inspirational PowerPoint-set-to-music things.

I don't normally open them, but then, I don't normally get them from my MOM either.

And this one was quite good.

There were lots of little reminders that I needed reminding of. (If that makes sense. And yes, I'm going to end that sentence with a preposition. There's nothing wrong with that.)

This is the one that's been dancing in my head all morning:

Burn the candles; use the nice sheets. Don't save it for a special day. Today is special.

I need to remember that. I'm a pack rat. I've mentioned that a few times I think. I'm not as bad as I used to be though - I'm even using the shower gel I got for Christmas this year.

When we were kids, we used to get small, novelty soaps (shaped like animals and flowers and even once I got a Cabbage Patch Kid!) in goody bags at birthday and other events. I stashed all of mine away in a box because if I used them, they wouldn't be special anymore. I remember finding the box when we moved when I was fifteen. The soaps were all stinky and dusty and sticky. I threw them away even though it pained me deeply. That's not an exaggeration.

So sometimes I need reminding that if we don't use something, it will actually become worthless because it will spoil or go bad or spill or get lost. So there are nice soaps in the bathrooms. We have lovely sheets on our bed. When our towels get old, we get to use the new ones (I have about 20 bath towels that we received as wedding gifts stashed in a storage box) instead of cycling the guest towels to us and giving the guests brand new towels. Because we deserve to use the nice stuff too. And really, we rarely have overnight guests, so the current guest towels ARE like new!

Tonight, I'm going to get out a lovely candle that my grandma gave me. That I'm pretty sure she had since the seventies. And after J goes to bed, I'm going to work by candlelight instead of electricity. Well, sort of. The computer still need electricity...

Thanks for the reminders, Mom! I saved the PowerPoint on my desktop so that when things get hairy at work, I have something to remind me of what life is really about!