Friday night grateful moment

arning! This post may be filled with an excessive number of exclamation points!

It's Friday night!
Seth's home!
It's the weekend!
We're all together!
Fun stuff on tap for the weekend!
It's only seven days until my birthday! (Ha, what a child I am. Who gets excited about birthdays at my age? Well, if you had my husband, you'd get excited too. He's kind of stellar at the birthday thing. No pressure, honey.)

See? Those exclamation points could get really annoying, eh? So I'll dial it back, a bit. Just for you. (In my head though, there are exclamation points going crazy, all over the place. But you can't see them. See how grown up I can pretend to be?)

It was a beautiful fall day today. And actually it's been a pretty good week. A real autumn mixture--there was a really warm day to start things off, followed by fog and a little rain, some just plain gray blah, finishing off with some sunshine interspersed with clouds and gray. No frost yet, at least in our little corner of the world, so that's bonus! I'm grateful for the warm days to at least contemplate getting the garden clear before it all turns to frozen mush. (Have I done it yet? No. Will I probably wait until it's mush? Alas, yes, probably.)

I'm grateful for opportunities, and second chances. When I consider how many second chances I've been given in my life, and witness the same in the lives around me, I wonder how many other/additional second chances I've been given that I'm not even aware of. Follow? It reminds me to continue to extend grace where I can, and live less in judgement. Because goodness knows, I do need that extended back to me most days.

My family provides such loving and consistent support, and I'm grateful for them.

Sleep will always be high on my grateful list. Especially the few hours I can scrounge in the early morning after a bit of a gap in the night. Those are precious scrounged hours!

Fresh, crisp new-crop apples make me excessively happy. I'm grateful to live where fresh fruits and vegetables are so very plentiful, for so much of the year.

Fall decorations are out and mostly up, which makes me very grateful for the change of seasons. White pumpkins are so pretty. Why is that? Orange is perfectly acceptable, but along come the white ones and I'm all enamored--have been for years now, I suppose... but boy have they been hard to come by, locally. I found a few in my apple hunt yesterday, but small ones. Maybe next year we'll plant our own...

The doggies and their abundant enthusiasm for my presence make me grateful for their bouncy, happy ways. I swear Chief was a horse in a previous life, the way he gallops--yes, gallops!--around the yard. I think he would be perfectly happy with a mane to go with his tail.

A bumper crop of butternuts this year!

Mashed purple potatoes from our garden, in case you were wondering...

I'm grateful for the continued color in the garden--the nasturiums especially just will not end! I love it. And there are still strawberries in the strawberry patch, and rhubarb to be harvested again...

A friend posted this to Facebook today, and it really resonated: If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path. -Joseph Campbell

I'm grateful for words, thoughts, ideas, inspirations. The world is so full of them, if we just open our eyes and look around. FULL, I tell you!

I was reading in a book this morning, A Little Book of Healing Prayer, and chanced upon these words: Behold, Lord, an empty vessel that needs to be filled. My Lord, fill it. I am weak in the faith; strengthen me. I am cold in love; warm me and make me fervent that my love may go out to my neighbor. I do not have a strong and firm faith; at times I doubt and am unable to trust you altogether. O Lord, help me and strengthen my faith and trust in you.

It wasn't until I was completely done reading it when I saw the name it was attributed to: Martin Luther. I don't know why that surprised me, but it did. It also made me incredibly grateful for those who have come before, and for those who took the time to record their thoughts, words, prayers and feelings so that centuries later, those of us reading can be surprised, be bolstered in our own journey, encouraged in our doubt and fear, and revived in our faith.

I had lunch today with the pastor of my childhood church and his wife, who are here in town visiting their daughter, who is a dear friend of mine. The daughter and I weren't friends as children in British Columbia (a few years between us that matters at 14 but certainly not at 40+), but have become close here, many miles away... amazing how those things work out, eh? It was a great deal of fun to catch up with them and have probably the first REAL conversation of my life with them. As a child/teen, it was all fine and nice and whatever, but it wasn't much beyond hello and how are you? Once again, I was grateful for my childhood and the many people who made up the tribe that contributed to my upbringing. Way before Ms. Clinton coined it, there were villages, doing their thing with raising children. And I was blessed to have a very good village.

And because it wouldn't be a week without a little Pinterest, here are a few images that just popped up along that path this week. Little nuggets of joy, if you will...

bunny (such cuteness!)

 madeleines (how candy corn of me--I actually don't like the candy, but the look is fun)

rice krispie treats (see how much I like the candy corn look? Obviously quite a bit...)

pinecones (must make for the holidays!)

halloween pets (I'm thinking everyone I know with a small animal must indulge in these for Halloween!)

october

thankful

thing 1&2 (gets my twin itch going, for sure!)

gloves (definitely on the to-make list)

How has your week gone? Full of good stuff, bad stuff, middle-of-the-road stuff? The stuff of life? Tell me about it!

I hope that no matter how it's been, you're glad to be at the weekend, and you get a chance to relax and rest a bit, enjoy family and/or friends, and indulge in a little bit of whatever makes you happy.

Peace.