Virtuous & Lovely

It's a cloudy day outside and the sky has been spitting intermittent sprinkles of rain all morning. I love cloudy days; they wake up the 1950's Betty-Bake-a-Lot that usually hiberbates in some obscure corner of my pancreas and suddenly I have irresistable urges to wear my pink apron, bake bread, organize closets, and spend money in the housewares section of Target. So I'm happy that it's cloudy. Here are a few other things that are making me happy today:

My backyard is blooming. (The pictures at the top of this post are of the wisteria vine that crawls along my back fence and the one lonely rose bud that I found on the bush the other day.)

I periodically clean out my SPAM box, which amasses quite an accumulation of crap between purgings--and today I got two very large grins from the following subject lines: "Her is relish" and "You be poop." The reason this makes my "happy list" is because those useless wastes of cyberspace were properly exiled to my SPAM box and not polluting my inbox. This is all due to the impeccable filters of Google e.mail. Thank you, G.Mail, I pledge allegiance to you forever.

I visited my friend Katrina's blog yesterday morning and literally had my breath taken away by this stunning picture from her recent wedding. It makes me want to break out in a spirited rendition of this song. Katrina, you are a lovely bride and Jared has just landed himself in the 97th percentile of lucky men to marry one of my neat friends! I couldn't be happier for the two of you.

We slept until 9:09 this morning. Delightful. But it was a mistake. You see, we have these lofty life-planning, dream making, career charting chats at night before bed, (that inadvertently stretch into the wee hours of the morning,) and sometimes we get so carried away in the scheems and scenarios of "someday" that we forgot about the small details of this day-like setting an alarm. So this morning we awoke to the ring of the telephone. It was my dear friend, Elizabeth, calling to see if Henry and I were up for a walk with her and baby Sam. That made me happy. And it was so lovely to wake up to Elizabeth's voice...hmmm, I wonder if she'd give us a wake-up call every morning ???

And of course, there is always the happiness of Henry! Yesterday morning he melted my heart into a puddle of goo with his breakfast chatter. First, I asked him if he was cold because he kept shivering. "No," he said, "I not cold. I feezing." And then when I put a banana on the tray of his highchair, he carefully picked it up, gave it a scrupulous inspection, and upon discovering a little bruise said, "hey mom, bananie got a owie!" I assured him that it would still taste good and as he shoved impolitely large chunks of the fruit into his mouth, he reassured himself, " 'till tase good."

And finally, last night I wore my pink frilly skirt (that I've had for four years, but always feel a littly bit frumpy and chubby in,) to a church function and I got four compliments. Four! That's more compliments than I can ever remember getting on any outfit, except maybe my wedding dress. That made me and my neglected pink skirt happy. Moral of the story: if you think someone has a cute skirt, or a cute anything, tell them.