More wisdom from the gridiron! And this from someone who has a great deal of trouble keeping straight the difference between a “safety” and a “touchback.” (Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know!)
I promise there won’t be any more football posts until the Super Bowl. With that, here goes:1. You have to shake off your failures and keep going, or you’ll just repeat them. You just threw an interception? Well, there’s another play coming up. Don’t botch that one. I’ve read or heard somewhere of a general in World War II who was known for this very quality; he kept moving forward, never referred to mistakes in the past, and led his men to success. I think he fought in North Africa, and I’d love to know who he was and read more about him. I have a terrible tendency to dwell on the “might have beens.” What a total waste of time. Learn from your mistakes and move on.
So yesterday I was finishing up decorating the Christmas tree, and all there was on PBS was either a fundraiser or a scrapbooking marathon (a perfectly okay hobby, I’m sure–but hours and hours of it?) and so I turned on the Seahawks/Steelers game to keep me company. (We don’t have cable, you see, so I’m limited to network TV and Netflix.) And then of course I had to watch the Broncos play New England, even though I expected it to be a total blowout. Which it wasn’t. But we won’t get into that here. Suffice it to say that my poor son’s ears are still ringing.
. . . we were visiting relatives in North Carolina at the request of our son Gideon, experiencing wonderful hospitality from my husband Jim’s aunt, uncle, and cousins. See the post I wrote on 
I would highly recommend these muffins, and you could leave off the topping if you want them to have less sugar. The amount in the muffins themselves isn’t too bad. You do have to measure a fair number of spices and grate apples. I kept trying to talk myself out of putting in the apples when I made this recipe for the first time, as I didn’t want to bother, but I decided I’d better go ahead and include them and I was glad I did. The combination of the pumpkin and the apple is really good, and the apples are probably counted as part of the liquid in the recipe. So it’s kind of a pain, but worth it. These probably aren’t muffins that you’d whip up for a regular weekday breakfast, but they’re very nice for a special occasion.
I have been hugely privileged to hear Mimi Wilson, a Christian writer and speaker, at various events, the most recent being a retreat I attended several weeks ago. She has traveled all over the world ministering with her physician husband Cal and is still doing so as much as she can in spite of her Parkinson’s disease. I can’t find a website featuring her on her own, but you can see some of her ideas about 
Here’s the list of (some of) my types:
Remember the post on “