1. Good food. Sweet potato and black bean quesadillas with sour cream, salsa, and avocado. Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups. Fresh pineapple. Tangerines. Smoked salmon with cream cheese on crackers. Snooze hashbrowns. Clean water.

2. Fresh snow. I tried to take a picture of it this morning while it was still dark out, and it looks like shooting stars.

3. Walking with Eric and the dogs. I’m still stupid happy that my foot is better, that I can walk with them. Napping and cuddling with them is good too.

Couching

4. Decluttering. This seems to be the time of year for it, but I’m also motivated because our next house project is refinishing our hardwood floors (finally — we pulled up the carpet 15 years ago and then were surprised by a kitchen renovation so the project was postponed), and it means moving stuff out of a whole half of our house for a week, which will be much easier if there’s less of it. We took a load to ARC from the garage last week, and yesterday I cleaned out the cereal/cracker/chips/cookie cabinet. Like I posted on Facebook, there was stuff in there that expired THREE years ago. There were four kinds of Triscuits, two kinds of Wasa crackers, and a huge unopened family sized box of Cheerios (neither Eric nor I remember buying these), ALL expired. There were various opened, partially eaten bags of things that when I pulled them out, the only memory I had of them were that they weren’t good, but knowing that in the past I’d still put them back in the cabinet and kept them. I threw three bags of expired, gross food in the trash, and recycled a ton of cardboard. There were even cookies in there that I’d forgotten about <– that alone is worth a whole post of its own — COOKIES I forgot to eat! This is huge people…

5. Another week of vacation. It’s always so lovely to take extra good care of myself, pay special attention to my tiny family, take time to sink more deeply into my life in a way that just doesn’t happen when I’m working at CSU.

Bonus Joy: good tv, good friends (smart and funny), being able to change my mind and say “no” even though I’d already said “yes,” a long marriage, going to the gym because I want to, feeling stronger, my new bathroom (yes, still), an Instagram feature that enables reporting comments as harassing or abusive, being able to block a number on my phone (I don’t know who you are and you should stop calling me if you aren’t going to leave a message), texting, heat, hot water, a washing machine that seemed to be losing its mind spontaneously going back to normal, the ability to make choices (seriously, how lucky am I that I get to even entertain the idea “what kind of new car do we want to buy?”), grocery shopping and laundry (yes, I like doing both).

1. Fall color. It was a long time coming this year.

2. Happy office plants. I had to bring them home while we were in a temporary location as they refurbished our building, and they did not thrive. They are all blooming and growing like crazy now that they are back in my CSU office.

3. Sam. He’s such a goof, so particular about everything, wanting and needing things to be the same and happen at the “right” times, so sweet but also kind of unsure of himself.

4. Ringo Blue. The one thing I wished for when we got a new dog after losing Dexter was one who liked to cuddle, and lately he’s really been getting the hang of it. We took a two hour nap together the other day and it was magic.

5. Anniversary flowers. We always say we aren’t getting each other anything, but then he gets me a little something anyway.

Bonus joy: healthy dogs (I was reminded that this time last year Ringo had a horrible case of kennel cough), good books — so many good books, our Homecoming open house happening today so that it will finally be over and we can get back to the real work, Friday, time to rest, sleeping in, my foot getting better and better, clean water, just a few more tiny tomatoes.