Day 180: Make a Move Events

What in the world, you may be asking, is a "Make a Move" event? Well it's something I initiated a couple of years ago, inspired by my friend Lori. Basically we send out an invite for people to join us in assembling "blessing" bags for the homeless. We fill gallon sized Ziploc bags with hygiene items, socks, non-perishable food items, and my hub and I add in Subway gift cards. We send out a list of what we are looking for, we take donations and buy suggested items with those donations, and then we take an hour on a designated Saturday and make up as many bags for men, women, and even children that we can. It's AWESOME. Piles of socks, piles of razors, stacks of granola bars and tuna kits, full size bottles of soaps, travel sized bottles of soaps, piles of toothbrushes and toothpaste, etc. And in about 30 minutes we can deplete those piles and stacks and make these bags up! I keep some of the bags in my car and look for opportunities to hand them out. In addition I sometimes throw an extra thing in to the event, like most recently I decided to collect as many coats/hats/scarves/gloves/boots as I could. We got very generous donations of coats and the like. I was so excited! I'm grateful for these events, they help me and others connect more with those who have found themselves in distressing situations.

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A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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