Four Wins

A Friday Hodgepodge

Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.

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1. One of the good things about landing in New Orleans is that we now live much closer to most of our relatives.

This made it easy for my brothers and I to show up all at once to celebrate Mom's 80th birthday a few weeks ago.

She'd made it clear she didn't want to make a big deal of it well in advance, but I told my brothers I was going to go up there on the day, anyway.

They followed suit, and my baby brother cooked catfish for lunch.

I think we struck the perfect medium between a big party and nothing at all, and she was happy to see her boys.

2. We're finally done wallpapering our daughter's upstairs bedroom.

I'd wanted to hire someone to do it, but my wife wanted to save some money and, I think, saw it as an interesting challenge. Knowing that she is really good at/has a high tolerance for the kind of tedious work that job required, I agreed to help her, provided I could limit my contribution to grunt work and things she was too short to do.

It took us the occasional weekend over a couple of months, but we're pleased with the results, and our cat, Lucinda, had a great time watching us.

Once we shift things around, we'll have a downstairs guest room and she'll have lots more closet space, and a room she got to decorate.

That said, we're hiring a painter to do our son's room.

3. My daughter recently participated in a high school math competition, where she did well.

On picking her up, I saw that she had a second place ribbon and ... a third-place trophy with four ribbons hanging from it.

Why all the ribbons? I asked.

The trophy was a team award, and she was the only one on her school's geometry team.

Based on her impression that there weren't that many teams, I thought it was kind of funny for her to leave with all that loot.

Later, she learned that there were twenty teams in the geometry competition, meaning she single-handedly beat 17 other teams. Even funnier, and really neat!

4. Belatedly due to our move, my son did his first solo trick-or-treat run in the Edward Scissorhands costume he made this Halloween. (Yes, he's still a fan of Tim Burton!).

It's bittersweet, but it's a win.

They sure grow up fast.

-- CAV