Small things #15:

1) Rolling over in the night and finding J there.

2) Captain, wanting morning pets. And then hopping down to let us sleep in until 8.

3) Being reunited with friends on our deck for a random Friday celebration, and laughing so hard our stomachs hurt. I am so blessed in my friends.

4) Hours-long phone calls to my mom, which likewise make my stomach hurt from laughter.

5) I began drafting the landscape plot of our property today. And I remembered the 'two-arc' method of drawing an irregular quadrilateral, (using only side lengths and diagonals!), from high school geometry. Did I EVER think I'd need to know that? No. It is such a sweet surprise to have a problem and then find in your mind all the pieces that build a solution.

Small things #14:

1) The way my pony calls for me as soon as she hears my voice. I have a special nicker all my own, different from the 'treats' nicker. What an enormous privilege that is.

2) Sore muscles. From having fun outside, not from being locked in the gym.

3) USU Extension, which is teaching me landscape design, for only $100!

4) Toy time with Captain. He's so painfully cute about this.

5) A cleanly swept porch.

Small things #13:

1) J is coming to get me. Not small, really. Not at all.

2) Seinfeld, which boosted me back up after Religulous dumped me in the doldrums.

3) books on my iPhone. Coraline was great, I look forward to the movie, and Pride and Prejudice is an old standby that I'm visiting again.

4) Stuffed sopaipillas at DJ's. I'm going to miss 'em. I'm going to miss 'em so much I might have mentioned it before...

5) Walter. Who went all the way to Belen at midnight to pick up Adam, when his car broke down. Hooray Walter!

Small things #12:

1) ...when a plan comes together...

2) Jigsaw puzzles

3) Finding money you forgot you had, stuffed in a pocket.

4) Stephen Briggs reading Terry Pratchett in audiobook. My life is more fun because of it. (How DID I ever get along before the iPod and the audiobook?)

5) gmail.

Small things #11:

1) Unstructured time. The picture above is the first one that comes up on a google image search for 'unstructured time'. Why should spending time always need to be 'profitable'?

2) My air mattress, which did not spring a leak until this weekend. If I fill it before I go to bed, I only have to fill it once in the middle of the night!

3) Thai food. Especially panang red curry with tofu.

4) Recognizing that what you have in your hand might be more valuable to someone else. I got a massage yesterday. The m.t. was telling me how she always wanted to be a marine biologist when she was a kid. But then she had to grow up and let go of her dream. She's always regretted it. I happened to have both a box of notecards AND Earthwatch's 2009 magazine of science volunteer/vacation opportunities in my bag. (What are the chances?!) So I wrote her a note, and left her the magazine. I also tipped her 50%, to get her started. I like to imagine her running with that.

5) Time passing. I also picked up a book about bridge yesterday, published in 1976 by, gasp!, a woman. The introduction is all about how you shouldn't assume that a woman doesn't have the endurance (!) or the intelligence (!) to play bridge, because Dorothy Truscott breaks all the barriers. I am so, so lucky that I didn't even know that there was a bridge barrier for women. You've come a long way, baby.

Small Things #12:

1) Being able to rant on your blog. And then sleep. Better out than in, dads always say. Although not about ranting, really. My apologies for the swearing. But if I kept it in my head, I would have been up all night arguing with people who weren't there.

2) The burrito lady, who has disappeared because the construction people are here, and/or somehow Chartwell's has chased her off. But she introduced me to the best bfb's anywhere. I talked about them for TEN years before I came back to Socorro. And now I know how to make them. Thank you burrito lady! I hope you come back soon.

3) The Navajo store. Which is out of dried berries. Because they won't have any more until more berries have grown and matured and been picked and dried. There's something bizarrely satisfying about being disappointed in my dried berry supply.

4) Friends who take my remarks and turn them into poetry.

5) Bridge. I won an actual hand. ON PURPOSE. I made the contract, on purpose, and understood all the bidding, and argued with my partner to be the one to play it, and then I played it, and made the contract +3 tricks! Wow. I'm so impressed with myself.

Small Things #11:

1) John Cusack. Igor was funny. But I especially love High Fidelity. Which brings me to

2) Nick Hornby.

3) This word: soupçon, which I recently heard used in actual conversation for the very first time.

4) The vast internet, which gave me a way to type the cedilla (and reminded me what it was called).

5) My kindergarten teacher, who taught me to draw a five by putting on the coat, and then the boots and then the hat. I think of it now, because the cedilla looks like shooz for the 'c'.

Small things #10:

1-5) Watching students go on to graduate school, and totally kick butt. Ok. That's not so small. But it deserves Ben and Jerry's, I think. I raise a spoon in honor of Ang. Nice work.

Small things #9:

1) Closed office doors. On a day when it's 70+ and sunny. Fun is happening.

2) Stretching.

3) My cast iron pan. Which makes the best french fries on the planet.

4) Listening to Obama, eating popcorn, and texting exclamation points back and forth to J.

5) Socorro Transportation, which is going to take me to the train on Monday, so that I can spend the day in Albuquerque. And they'll only charge me $1 each way! Of course, I have to leave at 5:30 am, but that's ok. ;)

Small things #8:

1) Seeds are arriving at my house. They'll be there when I get back.

2) I had a whole discussion last night about whether or not it was possible to combine a cat and an oven, and make a tumble-dryer for clothes. Net result? Yes, if you didn't care that your clothes were in tiny shreds afterwards. Oh and covered in cat hair. The jury is still out on whether a dryer sheet would fix this problem.

3) Bagels.

4) Asparagus. Now in season around here. And on a related note: The Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board. Oh, and the award-winning Asparagus, The Movie. Who knew?! I need that word again. Wow! People! Wow! I'm crying from laughing over here.

5) The Office.

Small things #7:

1) Sushi with A&K(&A&G), even when I'm not there... ; )

2) Chimineas.

3) The iTunes store.

4) Lucinda Williams.

5) Really nice notebooks with creamy paper and smooth writing pens.

Small things #6:

1) Circus Ponies! No, not the fuzzy ones. The software ones.

2) Killing two reports with one stone.

3) Reports. Oh. I get it. They are for ME.

4) Absolutely dreadful talks are good for daydreaming. A little slice of time when you don't get what you want, and can't be distracted by YouTube.

5) Bingham's Cyclery.

Small things #5:

1) Hiking with friends. Even when they get all manly-man-man and annoying.

2) Emergency snacks.

3) E & M, who gave a new home to Huey, Dewey, Louie, Bill and Ted, and are so excited about it. I will always remember M's face when I set up the aquarium on her counter. She couldn't take her eyes off them.

4) The Seed Savers Exchange---the world's most beautiful catalog.

5) Facebook Scrabble. Which is to real Scrabble as American Guinness is to real Irish Guinness. It is wonderful because it's a pale, ghostly, but accessible reminder of how wonderful the real thing is.

Small Things #4:

Can't be helped. We need another post today.

1) Colin's pictures. This is my favorite. Calcite with the new SEM. It's breath-taking. My colleagues stagger me routinely. And these are just the warm-up pictures. Wow. Colin. Wow. Admiration from afar.

2) ULIRG talk. With pictures. Of the most distant quasars.

3) Today, my friends showed me pictures covering orders of magnitude from ~10^-6 to ~10^29. How do we even hold it in our heads? I'm dizzy.

4) Colloquium today (the ULIRGS) was simultaneously viewed by people in Socorro, Albuquerque and Santiago. Yes. That's Chile. On the other side of the planet (depending on how you draw your sides).

5) And yet, I still get to eat lunch.

Small Things #3:

1) Alternate definitions of 'winning'.

2) Wind that blows so hard it BREAKS THE DOOR. WOW! WOW. Seriously. Wow. I thought we were having a tornado. Turns out I just have wimpy, mostly-already-broken doors. Still. Wow.

3) My morning encounter with Jehovah's Witnesses. They are so cute and roly-poly and earnest. Especially when they show me astronomy pictures on their pamphlets. I sincerely love people. Everyone picks their own favorites from the thousand words a picture represents. Such glorious diversity. So many ways to think.

4) 4.5 billion more years of sunshine. Wealth beyond imagining.

5) University mail rooms---so much more convenient than the post office. They saved me about 3 miles of walking with a heavy package today.

Small things #2:

1) Libraries. Not our sole redeeming idea, arguably not our best redeeming idea, but redemption, nonetheless.

2) Anne of Green Gables. I never get tired of this story, and the eye-candy that CBC made of it.

3) Darwin and Lincoln, born on the EXACT SAME DAY. A good day for the species.

4) My iPhone, which lets me listen to NPR from all over the country, without an internet connection, even when it's windy and local NPR is down. (NPR deserves it's own post.)

5) A second cup of tea at breakfast.

Small things #1

1) It snowed yesterday, and it's 56 today.

2) Today is pizza lunch, and I get to look at pretty Spitzer pictures.

3) The loading dock guy is so nice and helpful. I will bring him a chocolate bar, in trade for the boxes he is saving for me.

4) Puppies exist!

5) Fresh, organic, in-season beets are now in the grocery store. Mmmmm... roasted beets...

Small things...

I just ran across a series of posts from this blogger:

http://futurehousefarm.blogspot.com/

called 'Grace in Small Things...'

I thought it was a neat idea, and feel like I've been grumpy and disaffected lately.

So, in the spirit of admiration from afar and imitation as the finest form of flattery, I am going to copy them, and start my own listing!

I'll see if I can limit myself to five a day... ; )