Once, at Thanksgiving, a neighbor wandered in while my cousin Lisa worked on a turkey, shearing meat off its frame and sliding the steaming slices onto a big flowered plate. 'Hey, that's the man's job,' she yelped, in between slurps of her Big Gulp. No one even paused to acknowledge the comment; everyone just laughed and laughed.

My mother very rarely skipped a Thanksgiving turkey. And yet, none of them ever tasted quite the same, landing somewhere on a sliding scale of succulence. She'd try new methods.

Cycling taught me to recognize that mental health is on a sliding scale. Some days you are up and some days you are down.

Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.

I think that just sitting down and having casual conversation is the hardest stuff to do. But the extremes? I know what it feels like to come racing around the corner at 90 miles an hour, sliding the car sideways. I know what gear I'm hitting it in when I'm coming around the corner and where I need to downshift. So to me, that's the fun stuff.

I wish there were more true conversion and then there would not be so much backsliding and for fear of suffering living at ease when there are so few to contend for Christ and His cause.

I'm not sure it's the stimulus money that will necessarily allow the economy to recover. It will help to fortify our budgets frankly to ensure that there isn't as much backsliding in the areas of education and healthcare for example.