Day 44: A house/shelter

Lest I sound trite I'm going to have to start acknowledging the "givens" for Gratitude Attitudes. Some days I just get "stuck", usually it's on those days that nothing has really happened good or bad, nothing has really stuck out, it's just been a ho-hum kind of day that passed by. But even with the "givens" shouldn't I be grateful? To take for granted the "givens" means, in my opinion, that I have ceased to be grateful for even those. A grateful heart, a gratitude attitude life, is grateful for all things, even or maybe especially the "givens".

So with that said... :)

Today I am grateful for shelter, a house to call a home. After traveling to my beloved Kenya and seeing other places in this world (even in my own city) where the kind of shelter I have is a luxury, I am not unaware of how blessed I am and I try to stay mindful of not taking the house we have for granted. We have a roof that doesn't leak, walls that stand strong against the winds and weather, windows to keep the moisture out, a furnace that gives us heat in the winter and cool air in the summer, we even have a whole "house" for our two cars! Whenever I am tempted to complain about something with our house all I need to do is remember the homeless person's sleeping bag I passed when I drove under the bridge on my way home or remember the people I have seen sleeping on the side of the road in the countries I have visited. So at the risk of sounding trite I am grateful today for our shelter.

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.

Call it a Day

The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment.

More bang for your buck

This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.

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