A little late, but I wanted to wish all of my readers a Happy New Year!
I sincerely hope that this New Year is full of great things for you, including lots of hugs and kisses. You can never give or receive too many hugs and kisses. I have mathematically proven this.
Go challenge yourself; do something unexpected; something that you’ve always wanted to do, but you’ve always thought you couldn’t. Oh, by the way, it better be something really awesome.
Like sugar cookies.
They might not be perfect the first time, or the second, or the third. But, I promise, that by the fourth time you will be marvelous at sugar cookie making. You’ll be making pretty snowflakes, and giving them to all of those special people in your life for the holidays, who will look at them and say “How do you get your piping so straight?” and you will smile to yourself and feel like a goddess. Ok, not so much, a goddess per say, but something of the sort. Others may ask “Where do you learn to do these things?” or “Did you work in a bakery?” And then your little secret might come out: you are a food blog addict. You have spent an innumerable amount of hours just reading and watching videos on how to perfect your sugar cookies. Hours that should have been spent cleaning the apartment or making that wedding album that you still haven’t gotten around to doing (and, yes, it has been a year and a half since we got married) or ordering those nail polishes for your aunt that you promised her three months ago.
I am certain that my parents instilled my love for travel in the months immediately after my birth. Before I could even learn how to smile my parents had me on airplanes jetting around Latin America. I am still discovering places I traveled to during those years that I cannot remember.
My ultimate goal is to become a Century Traveler, by travelling to one hundred countries. Ok, maybe one hundred countries is a bit much. Let’s change that to fifty. Fifty would be plenty. How far along am I? I am not quite sure, mostly due to Caribbean cruises. Seriously, all those islands that you stop at just start meshing together. So after a perfunctory list I just created I am at twenty-one, plus those Caribbean islands.
Here in Seattle, the days are getting shorter, grayer, and colder. And rainier. I believe, but am too lazy to check, that it was last March that we only saw the sun two days for the entire month. It’s been getting darker too. Every year I’m surprised anew about how early it gets dark outside. Today the sun had set by 4:30, not that Seattle could tell. The gray sky gradually becomes black. The worse was when I used to arrive at work by 7:30. I’d pull into the parking lot as the sun was just coming up, and leave after the sun had already gone down. Small wonder that all the doctors around here seem to recommend vitamin D supplements.
I met several interesting people this week. This might be due to my living in the mall for three days and a day long visit to my old office. Ok, you got me; I didn’t actually sleep in the mall. But, I did spend an approximate total of 20 hours over the course of those three days lingering in the halls of a strange contrived world full of fluorescent lights. I forgot to add that I was with a nine month old. Lots of fun.
On to the stories these people shared with me. The first has to do with Mario.