Posts by Thomas Hill III

My cousin brought something to my attention recently. The song we have all heard a thousand times, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” while still full of longing and melancholy, was originally much darker. Written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane for “Meet Me in St. Louis,” Judy Garland thought the original lyrics were too…

Last night, we had a gingerbread house building contest during our last Advent gathering. It has become something of a tradition with our adult kids. Over the years, we did various crafts each Sunday, but, once the kids got older, we ended up just doing the gingerbread houses, and it turned into a competition. This…

I was listening to the radio, and a song by AJR with that title came on. The chorus recites, “I ain’t happy yet, But I’m way less sad.” Sometimes, I find myself in that mental state. Not really happy, but not really sad either. It’s almost like I’m waiting for something to change so I…

Time with my granddaughter is wonderful and exhausting at the same time. One of the great (and not so great) things about a five-year-old is they tend to express their feelings unfiltered. I find myself restating things in different words or a different tone once her response lets me know how what I said or…

We sat through several hours of cold drizzle and edge-of-our-seats football to be present when our beloved Cowboys (the O State variety) won against the Cougars in double overtime. College football overtime rules state that no game can end in a tie. Both teams will possess the ball until one of them stops the other…

On Thursday, many of us will celebrate by eating ourselves into a tryptophan induced nap. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it is about gratefulness. It is also about food, so that’s awesome too. This week, I’ve had several opportunities to be reminded of many things I am grateful for, but one that rose to…

Ben Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” No leader worth their weight in annual reports would fail to prepare, right? Most of us spend a significant portion of our time in one form of preparation/planning or another. I heard a slightly different take on an old story recently—the story about…

Don’t judge me. I was watching House, the show about the antisocial maverick doctor who specializes in diagnostic medicine. The episode was about a woman who was experiencing Abulia (pronounced ah-bool-ya) which is a mental illness associated with the inability to act decisively. It is a clinical lack of willpower. I often watch TV or a…

I saw The 1975 in concert last week. They weren’t in my hometown, so the adventure included driving eight hours, attending the concert, getting a few hours of sleep, then driving eight hours back before I emceed an event the evening following the concert—all with my two college age boys and two of their friends.…

What do mental health, etiquette, and the isoperimetric problem have in common? If you guessed “a circle”, you are right, but I kind of gave away the answer in the title. How do you enclose the most ground with the least fence? That’s the isoperimetric problem, which is to determine a plane figure of the largest…