The Whole Wide World

Yesterday ended up being one of those days where my cup felt like it was overflowing with all the good stuff. Not just because it was my day off, it was truly a heart-so-full kind of day. I realized two things in the evening. The first being that the day before marked seven-months on the ice for me. Seven months. The second, that it was the one-year anniversary of my Dad’s liver transplant. One year. I’ve started saying it more and more over recent years, but back when I was kiddo, I used to wish time away. I always wanted to be older, to reach whatever milestone, to just fast forward time. Somewhere along the way that script flipped. I now want to slow time down. And while the time around my Dad’s liver transplant was rough goings, I still can’t believe an entire year has gone by already. 

In the spirit of a lazy day off, I can’t help but talk about food. Thursday lunch is typically asian themed. I don’t eat breakfast down here, so lunch is my first meal of the day. During the work week, I don’t put much thought into eating ‘lunch food’ for breakfast, but seeing as I sleep in on Thursdays and have really only accomplished drinking coffee and brushing my teeth before I head to lunch, well it kind of feels like college days, being lazy and eating Chinese food for breakfast. But, what I really want to comment on is last night’s dinner. Every now and then we have salmon and it’s not the mediocre kind of salmon either. It’s the strips of fillets that you get in a decent restaurant and down here that is something to get excited about, which I did and took two.  

After lunch, I finished season two of Ted Lasso. I don’t watch all that much television, so when I do I look for something worthy of the time spent watching it. Ted Lasso had me laughing out loud and crying, every single episode. I might be low key obsessed with it. I hear season three is floating around on a hard drive down here so my next mission is to acquire that.

I also finished a book I have been thoroughly enjoying called Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. It’s a great resource for anyone who enjoys writing and a nice easy read with small bitesize chapters. The book inspired me to sign up to host a booth at our upcoming Stall-a-palooza. There has been a sign up sheet in Highway One for a week or so now and there are probably 25 names on it so far. I finally added mine to it today. What’s Stall-a-palooza? I have no idea. I think anything goes. There is a prize for best decorated booth, that’s about all I know. 

One of the chapters in Natalie’s book is called Spontaneous Writing Booths and in summary, she suggests that at your next church/school/Zen center bazaar, carnival or rummage sale you set up a table and chair with a sign that reads Poems on Demand and bring a pen and stack of blank paper. People give you a subject and you write an in the moment poem on it. I am going to use some of the penguin themed ink-stamps we have to make a cute Antarctic card stock and make a bunch of photo copies of it and then let people give me topics and write them a short poem on the topic. I am nervous as hell that I won’t be able to come up with content, but it’s meant to be fun and I am going to have to remind myself of that on the day. Have fun with it. Comical short poems will most likely be the output.

In the evening, I started something I have been waiting to watch ever since I was in New Zealand seven months ago. The night before I left New Zealand to fly to Antarctica I found out my most favorite book ever was being made into a TV series. That’s Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. So not only did two great things come to an end (the book and Ted Lasso), another came into fruition (Shantaram) and the cherry on top—I opened mail I have been holding onto for the suspense of something to look forward to and found I had been thoughtfully gifted even more excellent reading material. A good day indeed.