Disgruntled

Nothing seems to be going right at Poppy Corners lately.

Our dishwasher crashed.

Our front doorknob stopped working.

The water feature suddenly spluttered its last.

My sourdough starter began to smell like gym socks.

The bee activity at the hive entrance is greatly reduced.

The dog had a weird thing where he yelped every time we touched his neck.

I had to step it up big time at work, with two very high-need children starting with us.

Kate got sick and missed three days of school.

All the neighbors already have their Christmas decorations up, and we still have pumpkins on our front stoop.

The weather is doing funny things - barometer up, barometer down - which causes me to have pretty nasty migraines.

And to top it all off, the garden is just not thriving. I can't figure out if it's a water problem, a soil problem, or if everything is taking its time germinating because it's so dang cold.

So I pretty much I felt like I wasn't doing anything well at all this week.

I felt like this old, cast-off boot I saw in the weeds next to a warehouse.
Useless.


So today I took the day off. I took Adam to the Conservatory, then grabbed Kate and met a friend in Berkeley, where we spent several blissful hours touring open artist studios (Berkeley Artisans) and eating tacos at Picante. This friend and I are kindred spirits, so we laughed and trooped around and generally acted like goofballs. I found this cured my headache, put both Kate and I in an improved mood, and made facing the rest of the day bearable.

We came home to find the dishwasher and the doorknobs fixed (yay for Tom). The dog had been to the vet and found to have nothing more than a wrenched neck muscle (hooray for painkillers). We hung some wreaths outside, and hope to do lights tomorrow. I took the pumpkins to the compost. I washed and filled up the bird feeders. I decided to make a loaf of bread from the funky sourdough, and it wasn't horrible (we'll use it in a savory bread pudding tomorrow). And I juiced a dozen Meyer lemons for the freezer. It's hard to feel bad when you're juicing a slice of sunshine.

Tom was kind enough to hold this up for me.
As Anne Shirley of Green Gables says, "Tomorrow is another day without any mistakes in it yet."