Gratitude

At least once a day, I stop and give thanks up to the Universe for all the wonders in my life.

I have an amazing husband and two beautiful children. My marriage is strong and happy, my children are strong and happy. Even if everything else were to crumble around me, as long as I still had them, I would still have hope.

I have a mother who loves me very much - something I didn't always have, but now that I do it stops me in my tracks every time I think of her. Same with my grandparents; sweet, kind people with a boundless capacity for love. I am so lucky they accepted me into their family.

I am blessed with some of the best friends anyone has ever had. Weedwoman is my soul sister; I have a bond with her that defies description. Kizz makes me laugh every single day; she is the epitome of capital-G-Girlfriend and, even though we live five hours away and only see each other a couple of times a year, she's one of the people I treasure most. Casablanca and Geisha, and Tenure and LittleBear, are more than friends - they're family. PTrinity and CTrinity are like safe deposit boxes to me right now - even though I don't get to see them much lately (we're all interning in high schools and are all, as we say in these parts, "wicked busy"), I know they're there, safe, waiting to be opened to reveal the treasures within.

I have new friends with enormous potential. PlumTomato and L-Sign are kind, encouraging, and funny. I'm so looking forward to having them in my life, and to the journeys we're now beginning. I also have an infant friendship with SilentSeed, and it's exciting and fun to watch it grow and unfold.


I have two amazing teachers at work - women who are strong, funny, smart (or, as we say around these parts, "wicked smaht"), experienced and kind. I'm learning SO much, and I'm grateful to them for their patience and eagerness to see me succeed.


The Universe is kind, and I am grateful.

Hysterical!

One of my best friends, Tenure, bought the first season of the Muppet Show on DVD recently, and last night we were at their place watching some of the special features on the last DVD. One of them went like this:

Statler and Waldorf were up in their balcony, and Statler was doing the intro for the next show ("next time on The Muppet Show, special guest star blah, blah...."). As he's talking to the camera, Waldorf is slowly caving in his face until it's completely imploded. Statler finishes his bit, looks over at his partner in crime, looks back at the camera, and pulls his own face in. I was DYING, it was the best laugh I've had in quite some time.

I miss Jim Henson.

I'm SO Predictable

A Girlfriend of mine posted her birthdate on her blog, along with the link to the site that generated the information. Being of the mildly adventurous sort, I thought I'd do the same.

It turns out that I'm a poster child for this kind of thing. The horoscopes that pop up on my internet home page are eerily accurate, as is this. Are my friends writing these things, and using me as an example of a typical Capricorn?

Your Birthdate: January 15

With a birthday on the 15th of any month, you are apt to have really strong attachments to home, family and domestic scene. The 1 and 5 equaling 6, provide the sort of energy that makes you an excellent parent or teacher. You are very responsible and capable. This is an attractive and an attracting influence. You like harmony in your environment and strive to maintain it. You tend to learn by observation rather than study and research. You may like to cook, but you probably don't follow recipes. This number shows artistic leanings and would certainly support an talents that may be otherwise in your makeup. You're a very generous and giving person, but perhaps a bit stubborn in ways.

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Houston, We Are Go For Launch...

So we're in the midst of a HUGE construction project. We're pretty much doubling the square footage of the house - new dining and living rooms, bumping out the kitchen by six feet and adding a master suite upstairs.

I'm not really handy. I will admit to more girly-girl tendencies than I really want to, in the interests of honesty (I can actually FEEL my sister's eyes rolling into the back of her head and, in fairness, nearly everyone is a girly-girl next to this woman - she's my hero). Anyway, I'm writing to you now during a break from destruction and painting. I'll talk about the deststruction later - what I really wanted to tell you about is the paint.

My husband is an engineer. One of the things that simultaneously delights and frustrates me about him is his attention to detail. He's fastidious. He LOVES to research stuff - sometimes to the point where he's researched something for so long that all his research is out of date and he needs to start again to have fresh data. Anyway, we're going to have radiant floor heating in the addition spaces - installed by my husband, by the way. In the course of researching all about radiant floor heating, he discovered that there's a special kind of paint (and a special kind of paint additive that you can stir into your own paint) that makes your walls particularly reflective. This is good if you have radiant floor heat - the reflective qualities of the walls bounce all that infra-red back to you and keeps you toasty.

So he was explaining all of this to me (before the paint arrived from....wait for it...the Cape Canaveral, Florida neighborhood - this is Space Shuttle technology here, folks!) when he explains that it's the equivalent of papering your walls with tin foil, which means we're safe from alien mind waves.

Painting with this stuff is a pain in the ass, though. When we mix the additive to the ceiling paint, it goes on nicely for the first little while, then the grey sploches start popping up. Painting with the stuff that arrived from Florida really IS the equivalent of painting tin foil onto the walls. I keep telling myself that it will all be worth it when we're cuddled up in our nice, toasty living room while winter howls outside, but it seems like a lot of work right now...

Disturbance in the Force...

Someone I love is not quite herself lately.

This someone is very close to me, even though we live several hours apart. We get to "talk" every day via email and IM, and she's one of the first three people I think of when I have news to tell - good or bad. Her friendship is precious to me.

What's got me all in a twist is that, the last time we talked (before I found out that she wasn't quite herself) felt weird and wrong. I was really upset about something that, admittedly, I've been upset about for a while; she (not wrongly) got fed up with me and called me on it; I got defensive and it just sort of spiraled from there.

Do I think I'm responsible for her funk? Probably not. (I'm reminded of an Amy Fix song called "Closet" and a line that says "I've got the 'living in the closet 'cause it would kill my mother, that's how powerful I am' blues") She and I have done this before. Periodically, she needs to take breaks. It doesn't have anything to do with me and I'm forced, every time, to realize that for as much as I love her, there's often nothing I can do to help her but stay the hell out of her way.

We IMed again today and I asked her if she was better. She said she wasn't. I asked if I could help. She said no. I asked if she wanted to talk about it. She said no. We went on to have a long chat about nothing in particular, but I still feel a distance. I miss her.

While I wait for her to find her way back to herself, I send as much positive energy into the Universe on her behalf as I can spare. And I thought this might help...