things that made me happy this week

Last week was hard. I felt pulled in so many different directions, and had to deal with multiple difficult people along the way, which made me wonder about myself again. I once skimmed through a "How to work with difficult people" book during a layover at an airport, and the last point the book made was that maybe I'm the difficult person. Think about it ... if I always feel that I am working with difficult people, perhaps I am the root of the problem?

Anyway, this week's no better, but a couple of things in the past few days made me plenty happy:

1) I made some stir-fry udon noodles Monday night, enough for Broadway and I to both bring lunch yesterday and today. The noodles were an experiment; I've never made them before. It took longer cutting up all the chicken into thin strips than anything else, but it turned out all really delicious. All of this made me happy because it's one step in the right direction of managing my finances. Broadway and I always buy our lunches, which on cheap days still costs around $6 + drink, and on expensive days can be more than $10. That's a pretty significant monthly expense, and with our budgets, it's just stupid planning. We shouldn't buy lunch every day, but I've never managed to get my act together enough to bring something. So making lunch this week felt like a major accomplishment.

2) A friend has owns some pretty professional snow gear maintenance tools. He invited me over last night to use the equipment to tune my snowboard. It took about an hour total, and he laughed at me for being a boarder and accordingly having to wax such a large surface area (his skis took only a few minutes, but he had to do two of them). The whole process was really rather therapeutic. We had the radio blasting, and I went nuts filing and re-filing my edges to make sure they were sharp, and scraping and re-scraping the bottom to get all the excess wax out. Sure, it takes a few seconds in the shop with those great big waxing machines, but where's the satisfaction in that? :)

Broadway and I, along with a couple of friends, are going skiing this weekend. We leave tomorrow afternoon and have a 3-day lift and lodging package. I can't wait to get out of here, away from everything.