Saturday Hoorays

I give you a most enthusiastic Hello!! from my couch on a lazy Saturday afternoon.  I am feeling very grateful today, so here is a round of hoorays:

Hooray for Houseguests!

When I was scribbling my hopes, dreams, and To Do items for 2013 in January, I put "see friends and family" on there.  Adulthood can be kind of lonely and boring, and I am keen to keep in touch.  Since then we have been happily bowled over by entreaties to couch surf with loved ones and loved ones who generously travel, often long distances to see us.  We just finished a week with family that was filled with tasty food, local attractions (Aquarium!!!), and late night zombie games.  The house we live in now is perfect for hosting, and I am working on improving my hostess skills.  This round of houseguests I finally invested in some folding chairs to expand our seating possibilities and it improved the experience more than I anticipated.  I never thought I would be so excited about folding chairs (I totally got the fancy kind with cushions).

Still having fun with Instagram

Hooray for Belly Dancing!

While I am rather good at tasks that require small motor skills like drawing, knitting, and threading needles, I am terribly uncoordinated when it comes to moving my whole body coherently.  My only attempts at body choreography was a modern dance class and about a year practicing the martial art of Aikido in college.  I had been looking for opportunities to move my body again (and had even wished for belly dancing) when a local friend posted on her Facebook wall looking for a belly dance partner.  Heck yes!  I jumped on board and am absolutely loving it.  The studio is welcoming and upbeat, women of all ages, races, and body types are welcomed with open arms, and the style of danc is something I can actually follow.  Plus, the classes are pay-as-you-go and fit into my schedule and budget.  I've been going for a few months and it is the best way to begin my weekend.

Hooray for Belly Button Piercings!

I toyed with the idea of a belly button piercing in high school, but I kept denying myself and waiting for the "perfect body."  It occurred to me a week ago that my self esteem is a whole lot better and I enjoy my body as it is, so I went out and rewarded myself with a belly button piercing today.  I suppose this hooray could alternatively be titled "Hooray for not being a teenager wading through depression and angst!"  But that isn't nearly as fun.  :)  

What are your hoorays today?

Saturday morning hoorays

So I ended up at my belly dancing lesson an hour early (instead of researcing times last night I just kind of fell into bed...it was one of those weeks) and I was kind of disgruntled because All The Projects are at home a long drive away and what was I going to do for an hour besides shopping that I don't want or need to do and also I forgot my knitting?

OH WAIT! Here is my fully charged smartphone with the internets.  Internets, instead of being disgruntled I am going to tell you about my life with some hoorays:

1. Pirate and I are married!  While I loved our wedding and wish it could have been a whole day affair instead of just an evening one, I am overjoyed at the emotional, mental, and physical space I have now I am not wedding planning.  (Seriously, one year of planning for 7 hours?  Per APW, I suppose it's all about defining the relationship instead of just the party.)  Married life is peaceful and amazing and I wouldn't trade it or the journey that got us here for anything.  Hoooray!

2.  While the two weeks of waiting for it after the wedding were excruciating, the honeymoon itself was awesome! We went on a cruise to the Caribbean.  We spent most of the wedding weekend seperate due to different social obligations, so it was exceptionally nice to have the honeymoon as a unifying (tasty, sun drenched, tropical, caarefree) experience. Hooray!

3. This hedge I am parked by.  What can I say, I like hedges.  I park next to them at work too.  Hooray!

4. Unexpected time to blog. I am off to write posts on different subjects now.  Hooray!

Lazy Sunday Hoorays

My pet rat Percy is finally responding to his medication after a few months of trial and error medicine!  Hooray!  Because if the steroids didn't work there was nothing else left to try, and that would have been very sad.   It appears to be an autoimmune disease that initially presented as mites.  He is also regularly (and happily) gobbling baby food from a syringe. I just stuffed him full of sweet potatoes and chicken, so hopefully he won't be so bony in the coming weeks.

I am inching ever closer to being done with wedding planning and wedding decisions.  Hooray!  This weekend I figured out the remaining details of what I am doing with flowers, tables, cupcakes, and sound system.  I am hoping to finish the program and menu before I go to bed.

We had some nice weather and got to deep clean the car!  Hooray for that because it had been bugging me for several months.  Now I won't sit in traffic and feel gross.

And on a related note that deserves its own hooray, I finally got a CD binder for all the cds floating around the car.  Now all the cds are organized and protected from our feet...a definite upgrade from their previous living space of any nook, cranny, and floorboard.

Last week I did something that was personally terrifying for me, but will ultimately bring many benefits.  I did it with grace and courage and the Pirate brought me the most colorful flowers that still look lovely.

Friday Hoorays: Sushi Edition

--The Pirate has recently become enthusiastic about sushi, so we have been seeking out Sushi Adventures. (We have the best Adventures.)
--Tonight we are celebrating an accomplishment of the Pirate. Hooray Pirate!
--Of course this means celebrating with an extravagent sushi bar restaurant tonight. The menu has flavors we didn't even know existed. (We are still somewhat limited in our sushi experience so this isn't hard, but exciting nonetheless!)
--We also spent an evening exploring our local stores and international markets for sushi ingedients and had a pretty good first run at a basic recipe.
--Since we can manufacture the sushi ourselves, this means I can make personal sushi that contains nothing but avocado!

Also

--I brought my colored pencils and sketchbook into work today for entertainment on my lunchbreak.  Hooray creativity!

Monday Hoorays

--Salmon chowder soup for this week's lunches.
--A satifyingly whittled down to-do list and neatly wrapped personalized wedding favors.
--Friends!  And the technology that allows you to keep in touch over time and distance.
--The bike trail right next to my house and birke rides with the Pirate.
--Re-discovering old cross-stitch projects. Bonus: all thread present, accounted for, and sorted (thanks, Ondrea of the past!)
--That sweet spot between dreaming and waking when you snuggle down into your bedfellow
--That I have access to a private porch, chair, and sunshine since I spent a good majority of Sunday like this:

Gratitudes

Five things I am thanksul for, in no particular order:

- The Blogger app, which allows me to tap out blog entries on my work breaks.
- TAZO Zen tea
- The Pirate for a lovely evening of edamame bites, X-Files, and pet wrangling.
- Re-reading books from my high school days and realizing I like them just as much as I remember
- It is still cool enough in the South to open our windows and enjoy the weather (also, that I live in a quiet neighborhood)

Friday Hoorays and Pre-destination

• I am cat-sitting for Gary the Pinhead.  Hooray! Though our interactions consist of him hissing at me and my giving him food, I am having a grand time.  (Can you tell I am cat deprived)  Hopefully by the next week I will have figured out his favorite flavor of Friskies and he will let me pet his head.
• Free laundry and freshly washed underthings.  Hooray!
• Bright red tulips.  Hooray!

One day I will have a camera that can take a decent picture of bright red things in low light.

• The new bearded dragon Stoneface was not dead, just very aptly named.  Hooray!
• Stackable rings that come in multiple colors for exciting stacking action.  Hooray!
• My hat has finally dried out from Monday's deluge, just in time to get soaked today.  Hooray!
• I started looking for a job so I can pay rent when I move in a few months.  Hooray!  As part of the process I am mulling over what I do, what I want to do, and what I like to do.  Though I have caught several threads of my life that I want to keep, the rest is a jumbled mess because there are so many possibilities.   It's like a ball of yarn barfed up by a ballwinder that tangled everything when you weren't looking.  I keep pulling at different ends sticking out of the ball, hoping one path will obviously un-knot everything but nothing is coming loose.  I am, however, sensing a general theme emerging that is summed up quite nicely by this quote of Bill Watterson's commencement speech he gave to Kenyon:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

You can find the full speech here.  I've read it at least once a year for the past four years as preparation for teaching the ExCo course on Calvin and Hobbes but stumbled across it randomly today along with a Calvin and Hobbes strip about pre-desination.  Funny how those things happen.