1. I am not dead. This cheers me more than it does on some days because I have been talking to my friends, listening to the news and generally am provoked, more or less in self-defense, to count what blessings are mine and what curses, minor and major, are not mine. It's sink or count.
2. I have figured out that I can ice the bottom of my foot - which has developed a strange burning kind of pain for no reason on god's not yet (here) green earth - while putting on makeup, thereby saving myself a whole 10 minutes I can't spare in the morning and enabling me to insert my right foot in a shoe and hobble bravely off to work.
3. I do not have three adult offspring living with me, one of whom ruins my entire night of sleep by yakking on the phone at 4:00 a.m. in the next room.
4. I did not go to the Dominican Republic to find every single travel arrangement screwed up and have my baggage lost until two days before returning. The baggage I didn't lose didn't contain life-sustaining medication and I was not in a place where I could not replace said medication. I didn't go, so I didn't follow the trip up with an emergency appointment with the dentist either.
5. The huge white blister on the inside of my lower lip - the one caused by a rogue strand of chicken in soup heated (by me) to past boiling - is healing. There won't be a scar. Not visibly anyway. And better yet, no one will phone to ask me if I was hit in the crosswalk accident they heard about on the news because I am too obviously clumsy to survive.
6. I do not work in a reasonable facsimile of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and am unlikely to encounter anyone, in my daily work, who can weave a blanket and bra together and make a hat out of it. No coworker will make me count how many cookies someone else eats.
7. Minor Deity fixed a Trojan virus on the computer at work and we got to have a pleasant chat wherein he accused me of surfing porn sites at the front desk of the library. I assured him that people liked that. My coworker assured him it made the place feel more homey. That broke up the work day nicely.
8. The number 20 bus at high rush hour was one of the newer models I refer to as "mini vans" and passengers were about standing in the driver's lap and on the dashboard by mile two. I gave my seat up for an older man who, while not looking terribly frail, was lugging shopping bags and appeared to be panic-stricken and frightened when he saw the lack of available space. That's not the good part.The good part was how, when anyone stands on the bus to give up a seat, it creates a tipping point and someone else or several someones also give up seats. A hefty man in work clothes offered me his seat. Okay. It's not much. But it counts because it reminds me that sometimes we are decent people if just reminded a little about decency.
9. I have traded a cow for a handful of magical dichroic glass cabochons and expect to see a beanstalk sprout magically from them at any moment. Or at least a few minor works of art. In a pinch, I'm sure they'll be tasty when I can no longer afford groceries - and the glass artist is having a very happy day. eBay loves me, too.
10. Someone gave me a compliment on LOE and someone else referred to this blog as "dessert." I had cookies to celebrate. I didn't count how many.
11. They say - the weather bastards, that is - that it will stop raining and driving cold gale winds into our little Maritime faces by Friday. They say that it will become almost warm and that bright and unfamiliar light will appear in the heavens during the day time. I'm only sort of counting that one. The weather bastards are always right about crappy conditions but they often miss on good ones.
All in all...well...I'm still standing. It's a lesser ambition than I once may have sported, but it's achievable. Hope you are all still standing too.
Love,
LJ
