grateful for iPhone
Tonight I am grateful for my iPhone, because not only can I use it as my phone, digital music player, and PDA, I can lounge around in places that are not in front of my computer and use WordPress for iPhone to post entries like this one. Unfortunately, they are not very long entries. (This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)
Read Moregrateful for travel
I can hardly sit still long enough to write this entry — today FunkyPlaid and I bought our tickets for our trip to Scotland this autumn! We will be there for just over two weeks, and it will be my first time in Scotland. FunkyPlaid lived there while he earned his graduate degree in Scottish history, and he has been there many times, so I will have an excellent guide. My visit to Scotland is also laced with emotional symbolism; FunkyPlaid and I spent two rollercoaster months getting to know each other before he moved to Edinburgh, and I was more than a little envious of his big adventure. Existing in Edinburgh with him will bring that part of our history full-circle. It will also be a litmus test to see if I can stand to live there in the future...
Read Moregrateful for games
My life would be droll and dreary without games. Today I am grateful for them because had a marvelous time playing a table-top RPG called Changeling. I love RPGs, board games, card games, and puzzles. I am rarely without a crossword or Scrabble puzzle book, and FunkyPlaid and I have become avid geocachers in addition to our World of Warcraft habit hobby. Frankly, I could be a better game player. My ego is wrapped up in my gameplay because I am a fast learner but a slow refiner, and if I don’t play as well as I think I should be able to already, I get frustrated and sulky. I am also fairly horrible at games that require bluffing, but at least I know I’m horrible at those. Thursday nights are Board Game Nights at Gamescape North, which I try...
Read Moregrateful for my job
It isn’t quite what I thought it would be, and some days it is downright taxing, but I am grateful for my job at the library. I work with an astounding group of people who have shown me limitless generosity and sympathy. Some of the interactions with the public have been harrowing, but I enjoy helping people find information, especially when I get to learn something in the process. We have an amazing collection in a remarkable building, and we serve an incredibly diverse population. When I am not bogged down by the minutiae of management, I am awed by the intricacies of such a grand institution. On that note, I realize it is hip now for San Franciscan yuppies to lampoon the homelessness problem as it pertains to the main branch of the public...
Read Moregrateful for books
When I started this exercise, I thought I might have some trouble enumerating all the objects of my gratitude, since I had been so focused on the negative for so long. Not so! Today’s entry is another easy one: I am grateful for books. I love words and stories, paper and ink, the sound of a new book’s spine as it is first opened, the smell of an old book’s pages. I believe in literacy and libraries, in the power of the written word to inspire and to inflame. I learned to read when I was 3 years old, and since then it has been my fondest hobby. It is the greatest luck that I find myself with a career in libraries so I can live my passion every day. My beloved gave me Iain Banks’ Matter for my birthday, and I have been savoring it...
Read Moregrateful for my voice
This summer cold has taken away my voice. I went through the day saying almost nothing, whispering when needed. There were nods and shakes of my head, shrugs, minimal gestures. Mostly I listened: to other people, to the sounds of children playing next door, to the cats purring, to my own sticky breathing, to my beloved’s quiet singing in the car. I am always surprised by the sound of my voice on recordings. We sound much lower inside our own heads, which makes perfect acoustic sense but still startles me. I sound like a little girl; my laugh is bizarre and whooping. Not-so-secretly I have always wished for a lower, sexier voice, something that prowls around vowels and shudders spines, chuckles that emanate whisky and chocolate. Today I would just...
Read Moregrateful for zen
No, this is not an entry about Buddhism. I am grateful for my not-so-small and not-so-normal cat, Zen. Zen turned 11 this year, which is hard for me to imagine, as it seemed like just yesterday I was adopting a tiny runt with gigantic headlight eyes. Zen is having a difficult time with the recent move. She has never lived with another cat before, aside from her litter-mates way back when, and I believe her poor eyesight is adding to her insecurity because she cannot track Torgi’s movements very well. Regardless, our little family persists, and I am hopeful that in a few more months we will all be adjusted to the new living arrangements. Zen is round like a little football, and still very strange, and she is devoted to me. When I am sad or lost, she is...
Read Moregrateful for health
This morning, I succumbed to the summer cold that’s traipsing around, so it might seem strange to write about being grateful for my health. The fact remains that my health is better than it has been in years, and all because I traced the source of most of my nagging problems to ingesting gluten. (This is why, for those of you who are starting to read my journal now, I am on a gluten-free diet; it is not a fad diet, but a diet required by an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine called Celiac Disease. Read up on this before lecturing me about how diets are bad for me.) Despite making such a huge breakthrough recently, I have much more work to go on my health. I need to find a daily exercise regimen that I will stick to, unlike going to the gym or...
Read Moregrateful for food
Despite my new gluten-free diet, I still love food. Perhaps I love it more than ever now that I have to be more mindful of it. Tonight I am grateful for the importance of food in my life, and I celebrated it with a homemade meal of pasta (brown rice fusilli) with marinara sauce, and blue lake beans sauteed in pancetta, garlic, and extra virgin olive oil infused with lemon. It took less than an hour to prepare everything, and was utterly worth it. Mind you, I won’t stop loving my curry take-out, but there is something inimitably satisfying about a good homemade meal, especially when shared with appreciative loved ones. Yum. If I weren’t so stuffed, I’d enjoy another helping right now! (This entry is part of one month of...
Read Moregrateful for music
This topic surprised me. I am trying not to follow any sort of order with these entries, so I sit down at the computer and whatever is top of mind comes out. Yesterday I started playing with the Remote app for my iPhone, which allows me to control iTunes on my iMac over our wireless network. Today I was able to play one of my iTunes playlists in the front-room while entertaining friends. It was such a small but rewarding accomplishment. I don’t recall being overly interested in music as a child, although I grew up with a father who appreciated classical music and a mother who was a professional vocalist. There were some piano lessons, drum lessons, and voice lessons, the last of which served to inspire a few different involvements with bands when I was...
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