Gruel for Breakfast...and Lunch...and Dinner!

I'm all about themes. I have a theme for everything. If a good movie is coming out, I force my sisters to dress up like the characters before we head out. If there is a fun 5k, I often dress up thematically for whatever the title of the 5k may be. During October I only read Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the like. During the winter, the literary preferences are Dickens, Jane Austen, and any other "wintery" authors. Every Monday I listen to Manic Monday. It usually sticks in my brain all day long and I sing it and sing it and sing it until I drive people crazy. This next weekend is Charles Dickens themed. I have a 10k in the morning called "Run Like the Dickens" and then I'm attending "The Christmas Carol" (play) in the afternoon. I plan on eating gruel...whatever that may be, and reading A Christmas Carol on Sunday. Perhaps I'll memorize the description of Scrooge and carry my own temperature. Side note: The other day, I shook a man's hand. He held it for a moment, wondering why it was so cold...I should have quoted Dickens! Though hopefully I don't have so cold a heart that I carry my own temperature. Just a funny thought...

"Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas."

Well, I wish you a wonderful holiday weekend! God bless us, everyone!

p.s. does anyone else think that scrooge is quite patronizing in the end of the book. He pats people on the top of the head. blech. Could he have swung too far to the other side of the pendulum? oh well, i suppose that's better than being cold-hearted.