2019 - Day 226/139 - Wednesday...Commensal...

Oh my. Today was full speed ahead. Breakfast at 7:30 then non-stop until 4ish. NAR Committee Leadership Camp is a full blown learning experience to make the next year a successful one, and to benefit all our 1.3M REALTOR® members, without them really even knowing it. When successes look easy, it is usually because of all the hard work that went into the planning and execution of the plan. SO, that is what the volunteer servants have been doing in Chicago for the past week. In my case, it was a quick trip with one full day of learning. Goal setting, facilitating, creativity, and organization. All these things are going to be put into use not only nationally, but also at our local and state levels. SO...can you tell I am a little bit pumped up? Enough of that. I love being in Chicago, even though it brings back conflicting emotions. Having grown up in Detroit, much of my fathers family relocated here from the DEEP south, looking for better lives and economic opportunities. For some of the family it worked, but for most of it, it didn't, and that is a discussion for another journal entry. Suffice it to say, I can appreciate this wonderful city for what it is, and I hope you enjoy this picture, taken from inside one of the meeting spaces I was in today. A bit of the old looking out onto some of the new. Oh yeah, and there was a lot of food. Food, food, food...

Commensal -- Adjective. 1. of or relating to those who habitually eat together. 2. of or relating to a relationship in which one organism obtains food or benefits from another without harm. Probiotics are a kind of commensal bacteria that live in the digestive tract of humans and aid in digestion.

Did You Know? Commensal types, be they human or beast, often "break bread" together. When they do, they are reflecting the etymology of commensal, which derives from the Latin prefix com-, meaning "with, together, jointly," and the Latin adjective mensalis, meaning "of the table." In its earliest English uses, commensal referred to people who ate together, but around 1870, biologists started using it for organisms that have no use for a four-piece table setting. Since then, the scientific sense has almost completely displaced the dining one.