Short List of Awesome

• Le Miserables: there are no words. Just go see it, and bring kleenex.
• Coffee in the morning. (and usually mid-morning, afternoon, and occasionally evening).
• My daughter Jane. She has been working and working and saving and its about to pay off! On Wednesday she flies away to Cuba with her friend's family for a glorious week of fun. Danielle was Jane's first great friend when we moved here ten years ago, and I always valued hearing their shrieks of pure KID FUN when they threw themselves into Danielle's pool just a two house stone's throw from our back door. When they get together, they know how to PLAY. And that's what I'll be imagining them doing for a glorious week.
• And my daughter Arianna, who is away in Guatemala these days. She had her bag slashed in a crowded marketplace, and her wallet got stolen. Fortunately she was not carrying her driver licence or passport, but did "lose" her debit card. I'm always proud of my girl for not getting rattled and frightened of life. She just figures it out and marches on. She'll come home in April a changed woman, and I mean that in the proudest, most pleased sense of the word.
• Monday off! We are right now packing overnight bags for a little trip to Brandon, where all our babies were born. A day of swimming and snack munching, and a double date for me and Brian this evening with friends who've stuck with us even when they know better. Tonight we will dress up and head out to one of Brandon's best kept secrets: the annual Chef's Dinner. Just imagine all manner of chefs getting together and trying to outdo each other in the kitchen and little people like us getting to eat it all up. We haven't been in ten years or so, since we moved away, but I've never been to a chef's dinner that I didn't like. Never.
• My mom. I saw her last night, and she made us belly laugh with her self-effacing humour and brute honesty. I'm sure gonna miss her some day. And I often dread that time, I worry that I won't handle it very well at all. And then I'm mad at myself for not spending more time with her. But now I'm sliding away from awesome and toward something that sniffs of guilt. ewwww.
• A warm house. Sometimes when I'm running errands in Winnipeg and hate the cold, I think about homeless people and wonder how they have the will to survive. I hate being cold, and usually get through the winter by spending as much time indoors as humanly permissible. Some people don't have that choice. I meanwhile love my cozy warm house, and I love looking out at the wind whipping about just a few meters away while I feel nothing but warm.
• Hope. The older I get and the more that I reflect on things that have caused me difficulty through my life, the more I realize that the core is mostly anxiety. Strangely, knowing this gives me hope. Knowing this helps to release me from the chronic sense of failure and inadequacy. Well, if not release me, at least provide me some measure of comfort that its this malfunctioning section of my brain that is "to blame" for the relentlessness of some of my voices. ("It's not you- it's your brain"?!)
• Friends. I have some of the world's finest. I line them up in my memory, and study them one by one. Each one brings something to my life that I value. They are different from one another, and the richness of those differences is one of the things I treasure about having this wide circle.
• Ok, that's the short list. How about one of yours?

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