Ten Things Weekly--Week Four

Has it already been three weeks since I made the mind-expanding commitment to a weekly list of ten good things that happened in the previous seven days? My goodness, I’m becoming a veritable conduit of positive energy. Next thing you know, I’ll be reading "Chicken Soup for the (insert the name of your sorry-ass group here) Soul." Or writing it. Ewwww...

Currently, I’m in the curious space of watching the days and weeks whip past at lightning speed, while my own life crawls along at the pace of a spider missing six legs. How can it already be April? Wasn’t Christmas just a couple of weeks ago? I’m still vacuuming plastic fir needles and ornament hooks out of my carpeting…yet the crabtrees and the dogwoods are days away from bursting into bloom. And my life is so stagnant that I’m not sure ten things of any kind happened, much less ten good things.

Let me look down the corridor of the past week and see if I can spot ten points of light. This may take some time; I think a few might not be much bigger than a speck of leftover Christmas glitter…

1. Spotted our neighborhood bald eagle in a tree on the shore of Sauvie Island, across the channel from the dike on the Scappoose side. (Lucy has decided the dike is her favorite "dog outing" route. So many smells, so little time…and Mom and/or Dad usually produce a tennis ball for her to chase through the grasses.) We have dubbed our eagle "Sam," thinking the name would be appropriate for either gender, since we have no idea whether it is a male or a female.
2. Presented my horrible, inadequate business plan to a commercial loan officer, who did not laugh in my face (yet.)
3. Colored my hair. My pre-holiday haircut had eliminated the last vestiges of blond highlights from my mousy, dark brown fluff. I was quite taken with the fact that a fifty-year-old still had hair that could be described as "mousy brown," rather than gray. In fact, one of my sisters commented that she "wouldn’t have gone so dark" with the color, and looked a tad envious when I informed her that the dark brown was, in fact, my natural color. But after living with the new old me for about six months, I remembered why I have been coloring my hair since I was a teenager. Because my natural hair color sucks. So, back to the cap, gloves, and crochethook. It looks…better.
4. Participated in a "writing exercise" (posted two entries ago) that resulted in a lovely poetic picture of my family. This was such a fun exercise, though more difficult than it looked. Probably took me three hours to distill all the images it called into my head down to the ones that best told the story I wanted to tell. Here is the template. Why not do one and leave your link in the comments?
5. We made our first purchase of bio-diesel for "Great White"--the edging-toward-politically-correct giant mega-truck required by my business; which has, up ‘til now, inspired a worrisome pang of climate change guilt each time I clambered up behind the wheel. If I’m destined to pay in excess of $3 a gallon for fuel, why not pay a little extra for the privilege of sticking it to Bush, Exxon, and OPEC at the same time?
6. Finally got outside to do some yard work, which mostly entailed trimming back and pulling out freeze-killed plants. My high hopes that some of my tender perennials may have miraculously survived our unusually cold, dry winter were soundly dashed. But every dead plant is an opportunity to buy a new one…
7. Spent a day down south with my sisters and didn’t cry all the way home.  J In fact, we had a marvelous time with some blown eggs, cheap acrylic poster paint and vials of pastel glitter…
8. Met with my "new" Kaiser dentist; whose ministrations, it is to be hoped, will not necessitate unlocking a closed dental clinic on a Sunday afternoon so that I may undergo an emergency root-canal procedure. As did his predecessor’s…
9. Using my "brains over brawn" philosophy of donkey work, I managed to move two 100+ pound espresso machines without breaking either one of them or myself. I am woman, hear me roar…
10. Ate dinner Friday night in the shadow of the spectacular Astoria-Megler Bridge, the four-mile long span that connects Oregon and Washington at the mouth of the Columbia River. I’ll never tire of sitting in the back dining room of the shabby-attempting-chic Café Uniontown, watching the sun sink into the bay, hiding and reappearing between the girders of the bridge. The gulls wheel and cry; and huge ships slide steadily and almost silently past the last outpost of populated shoreline before reaching the open sea. For a girl brought up amid the cornfields and silos of the Chicago exurbs, this Oregon stuff never gets old.