Accentuate the Positive

I know I've been over-doing the lists lately, but that's the way I've been thinking most coherently. And what I need to do right now is to make a list of all the good things that have happened today.

1. Today is Chris's birthday! Today ends the thirteen days a year in which he gets to revel in having married an older woman. For the past thirteen days he's been all "Maryanne's 26. Me? I'm only 25. Older women are awesome. And my wife is really old." Now he can be old like me again.

2. Peanut butter chip pancakes for brunch.

3. Talking to the Wee Girlie over webcams, and learning that she got duck feet slippers for Christmas from her little friends, and that she spent the day reading Dr. Seuss's I Wish That I Had Duck Feet (which I bought her for Christmas last year, because it was her favourite book of Meg's, back when I babysat the WG).

4. Going through the pen drawer in Chris's desk and discovering that he'd squirreled away one of my beloved dark black Zebra Sarassa rollerball pens. A brand new one. I thought those were long gone, and had been longing for a good pen these days. Especially right now, while I'm doing serious editing. You need a good pen for that.

5. My instrumental Christmas carol station on Pandora.com.

6. This post of jo(e)'s. I especially love that the Christmas village was specially made so that kids would play with it.

7. This post of Stylegeek's. There are ways that it reminded me of my crazy Norweigan family.

8. Making plans with a friend in my department for Christmas Eve. He and his wife invited us over for their Christmas dinner. There's going to be a big group of us, mostly exchange students. We're going to bring mashed potatoes, vegetables, biscuits, and a lot of games. I also found out that his [Shirk] application got forwarded on to Ottawa. I'm really glad for him, because he could use that funding more than I could. Especially because his funding is his and his wife's primary source of income, unlike Chris and me.

9. Editing my essay and discovering that it's not half-bad. I started making such notes in the margin as, "I like this point! That's good!" I've learned to give myself positive feedback.

Yeah. It hasn't been a bad day after all. I'll focus on that.