Gratitude Friday

birthdayflowers

1. Time with friends. I got to spend some with three of them this week. I hadn’t seen them in awhile, and it was so good to be with them. We ate, laughed, cried, got covered in dog hair, and talked about important deep heart stuff.

2. My birthday. I’m happy to be celebrated, but also feel so grateful and lucky to get another year. I got to talk to my mom and brother, received some sweet gifts, was the center of a day long love fest on Facebook, and Eric made me a pie.

berrybirthdaypie

3. Winter lights in Old Town. I just love them so much.

oldtownlights

4. Ringo Blue turned two years old yesterday. I posted this picture on Facebook and Instagram, with this caption: “The first time I heard about him, I felt a flutter of knowing. The first time I saw a picture of him, I knew. The first time I held him, I was sure. Today when I was taking pictures of him as he tried not to fall asleep in his favorite chair, I could tell when he looked at me that he knew too.”

ringoistwo

5. Eric. For the pie, for walking the dogs every day twice a day while my foot rests, for taking them hiking too, for the sweet birthday card and the pie, and for making me laugh.

loryhike

Bonus joy: Two weeks down on the bathroom renovation and two to go (the latest: we have walls and they got painted today), the half bathroom at the back of our tiny house, how (mostly) good the dogs have been with all the chaos, a weekend off followed by a whole week off for Thanksgiving break, yoga, a chance to sub for my favorite class next week, sleep, clean water, Susannah Conway’s new ecourse “The Inside Story: Running a Heart-Centered Business” which is so good and perfectly timed it’s blowing my little mind.

lightball

1. Eric. Since my foot has been wrecked, he has taken over all the dog walking. This is no small thing, kind and gentle reader — our dogs get walked 5-6 miles every morning and another 2-3 every afternoon. I can’t wait to be well enough to start sharing the load again, but until I am, I’m so grateful Eric can, and more importantly that he doesn’t ever complain about it.

2. Our bathroom remodel is moving along. It’s a small crew, but they work really hard, are nice and funny and good at what they do, and are friendly to my dogs. When we had our kitchen remodeled all those years ago, the contractor and his lead guy were really good, but they had kind of crappy subcontractors, so I especially appreciate this crew. Yesterday they put in the new fan. Since we haven’t had one the whole time we’ve lived here (apparently that wasn’t a thing in the 60’s), it seems like some kind of magic.

3. Going to the gym every day. I was really struggling with what to do about my gym membership, struggling to get there at all. There are some things about it I don’t like (unstaffed weekend hours specifically) and making the transition from working out as a way of punishing myself to working out because it feels good and doing so without my trainer was proving to be really sticky and difficult. But without a functioning shower or tub during the remodel, my best option for a shower is to go to the gym every day. I’m glad for that because I’ve been realizing what a great little community I have there. I am getting hugs from various people every time I go in, people who genuinely missed me, and today one woman even stopped her workout and followed me into the locker room squealing my name she was so happy to see me. I also think that even though I still have to be so careful because of my foot, it’s actually helping my foot to do a bit more, to cultivate some of the strength I’ve lost over the last few months.

4. Our first snow. It wasn’t much and now the back yard is a muddy mess, but it was pretty the morning it happened, and later that day Eric took the dogs hiking up at Lory State Park.

snowhiking

5. Getting good work done, even with the chaos of my schedule and location. Part two of this item is being able to let go, forgive myself when I can’t get work done because of the chaos of my schedule and location.

6. Sam and Ringo. Being able to go on a walk alone with them. How good they are being even with all the noise and strange people in and out of the house. How much of a cuddle bug Ringo is turning into. How well Sam’s eyes are doing, (he has Pannus, but with special eye drops we are so far able to keep it pretty clear).

cuddlebug