Things That Make Me Happy

Made an early-morning trek through the grocery store today and the background music was playing Jim Boggia's "Listening to NRBQ" Such a wonderful song that so captures how special that band is. Nice way to start the day. Been humming it ever since.

Signs of the Apocolypse

It snowed today. With snowplows and everything. It's October.

A black man is about to be elected President of the United States.

I'm a little bit understanding microeconomics.

Good Manners

So I spent the day on campus - the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to be exact. It's rare that I have an entire day to hang out and work on stuff - usually I just run to campus to go to a class or go to the library. I really like that I can see classmates who are here during the day and get more acquainted with the workings of the program I'm in - being a part-time student means you miss a lot.

Here's what I'm o.k. about missing - undergraduates napping the hallways, messy (really messy) bathrooms, sloppy tabletops in the dining halls and male undergraduates who spit all the time. Seriously - where do the manners go?

On the way home from the Cape last weekend, I heard an interview with a woman who just wrote a biography about Emily Post. I know that the perception is that she was all about which fork to use, but I was so impressed to hear that she was really all about manners being more about how you make others feel. A smile to welcome someone, holding the door open, sitting up straight. It's not at all pretentious - it's gracious.

Rumor has it that we're in a recession - that means that jobs will become scarce and new college grads will have some stiff competition for good jobs. Maybe someone who learned something from Ms. Post might have an edge over the slob who doesn't flush...

Anyway - here in the lovely, gracious Berkshires, fall has arrived and I'm inspired by the golden yellow leaves all over the yard and the nip in the air. Even made Butternut Squash and Apple Soup this weekend. It was the least I could do for my wonderful husband who raked acres of the aforementioned leaves... Forecast calls for snow showers tomorrow night!

Our life here is nearly perfect and very gracious ~ And I'm sitting up straight as I type.

Resilience

So after a *minor* homework meltdown on Sunday (yep - tears and all), Jeff and I took a walk on the beach. The Brewster bayside beaches are lovely and the tide was going out, revealing, I dunno, a hundred yards or so of the Brewster Flats.

So not long into our walk, I had forgotten about microeconomics entirely, and my attention was drawn to the really neat stuff - like the pearly-golden seashells and the snails dragging themselves along the ridges of sculpted sand. It seems each time I'm there I see something I've never seen before and I get lost in the magic.

What really got my attention, though, was this large tuft of seagrass - like a little island pretty far offshore. Jeff and I took a closer look and it was clear that it's far enough out that when the tide comes in, this grass must become submerged. Still it survives and thrives.

I couldn't help but draw inspiration - wouldn't it be nice if I could be more like that? I'd like to learn to thrive, even when I feel like I'm drowning. Then come through it all tall and strong...

Reflections

I'm here, on the Cape, taking a break from homework.

It's different - all of it. Being here alone, being here when it's not summer anymore. I could be at home - doing just what I'm doing now. It's probably the same temperature (maybe a little cooler), probably breezy, (maybe not as much as the Cape today). I wonder what made me want to drive all this way?

I stopped at the grocery store in Orleans, then the wine store in Brewster on my way home last evening. It's a small town now, with the weather changing and the vacationers gone home. Clerks are chatty - I guess they assume I live here too. It's nice that it's all getting familiar.

It's beautiful here - the breeze, the ocean nearby. It's beautiful at home in the Berkshires, too. The leaves are changing and the sky is really blue in the mornings. It's getting to be snuggle weather - we'll be having a fire in the fireplace soon.

It's pretty special - being able to be homesick for both places.

Now if it weren't for this microeconomics stuff I'm supposed to be learning... Did you know that people use really dumb criteria to make buying decisions (see Rational Choice Models). Probably no beach for me today.

It's not every day

So I met this really interesting person the other day.

I was helping my work-friend, Jenny, who is a recruiter (employment kind, not army kind). She asked me to do a first interview with a candidate for employment, because his application showed he was from India and she's not particularly culturally-diverse-comfortable, so wanted me to meet with him first. She thinks I'm more patient with accents.

This man wasn't applying for any position in particular - he knows he has a language barrier, so he's looking for any job that would have him. So I asked him the most open-ended job related question I know: what kind of work do you really like to do? In a zillion years I would never had been prepared for the answer.

This kind gentleman asked me how much time I had to meet with him. When I invited him to take as long as he liked, he began to explain to me his lifelong goal - he wants to create a worldwide organization to, as he put it, "spread humanism all around the world." He drew the organizational chart for me -explaining the three types of help (physical help, financial help and knowledge help), and how he intended to get all this to happen. He then explained that he comes from a family that thinks his goal means he is lazy and doesn't want to do real work, so he'd like to work for our housekeeping department, please.

As we ended our meeting, he thanked me graciously for listening to him and told me that, whether we offered him employment or not, I should feel welcome to stay in touch with him, in case I ever needed help from him.

I'm glad Jenny asked me to cover this one for her. She might have thought he was nuts. It's possible that he is a little... but he's going to be great for our organization. He starts Monday.

Serendipity

So you know how the planets line up sometimes and point us to something wonderful? Here's todays wonderful thing (but there's a bunch of stuff leading up to it - bear with me):

A dozen years ago, we met Fred because of NRBQ and he introduced us to The Chandler Travis Philharmonic and gave us our first recording of the Incredible Casuals at the Wellfleet Beachcomber. Ok, so fast forward a bunch of years to last summer, when we saw signs around Wellfleet about praying for Caleb Potter and I searched the internet to try to find out what that was about and discovered Susan's blog and coincidentally, Susan is a friend of Fred's. Still with me? So Susan also blogs for the beachcomber and recently posted about this bridge in Wellfleet that was going to be torn down and rebuilt.

So, remember when I told you about buying this really cool condo (except that it's in a gated community and I have a hang up about that). Anyway, when we met the seller at the closing in May (she was really super nice) and she told us a bit about our neighbors and mentioned Mike who lives downstairs. When we were moving in, Mike offered to help us carry stuff and mentioned this neat thrift shop in Orleans that has furniture and said we might find bargains there. Still hanging in? O.k. so we're still furnishing and decorating our new place and today, I went into that thrift shop on a whim and found this beautiful photo, all wrapped and matted, of the very same Uncle Tim's bridge in Wellfleet, taken by the "Wellfleetian" fisherman and photographer Walter Baron. Clearly, I was meant to have this picture, especially because I had no reason to even know what Uncle Tim's bridge is if it hadn't been for these wonderful people I've been introduced to, plus it had been marked down twice and was truly a bargain. Here's the icing on the whole thing - Jeff mentioned (a couple of times this week) that it would be nice if we had a wine rack, preferably a black wrought iron one (there's a lot of wrought iron in the condo) and they also had one of those for ten bucks.

All of this leads me to feel very blessed - not just by the bargain, but all it represents. It came to us by way of a lot of good fortune, wonderful people, exceptional musicians who bring us joy, and a little help from the planets. I will treasure it all and, I hope, never take it for granted.