Bonus Post: Thing 54

100 Things I've Always Wanted To Say But Never Did And Now Maybe Should Since The World Might Be Ending -->

Thing 54:

File this under long overdue thanks ... but thanks to you, my high school English teacher Mrs. Mills, for providing me with a wealth of words on which I can rely and for encouraging me to feel free to not be oriented toward the bare minimum when it comes to expressing myself.  [Disclaimer -- my employer may sometimes prefer for me to be more precise, but ... hey ... I gotta be me!]  Freak that I am, I actually enjoyed weekly vocabulary building exercises (packaged in textbook form as Word Wealth as I recall), and, since that introduction, I've never met a word that I didn't immediately want to take in as one of my own (occasionally manipulating it as I saw fit).  Plus I still remember that when I turned in a 20+ page paper on an assignment that called for just 10, and you, in turn, provided me with 2-3 pages of feedback, and my other classmates accused you of a form of favoritism for providing me with more than just the paragraph response that you had given them, and that your reply was:  "well, do you want to be graded against the same expectations that I have for him?" ... THAT  was one of those moments that crystallized for me that I would be writing to the rhythm of my own style of wordsmithing for the rest of my life.  And since I get so much personal satisfaction out of doing so -- I want to be sure, before this world ends (allegedly), to say thanks for that!