FIVE GOOD THINGS FRIDAY

And it's been a good week.  Three days of work, one vacation day, and one I-have-to-try-and-work-from-home-because-my-daughter-is-sick-but-we-might-as-well-just-chalk-this-pseudo-workday-up-as-a-loss day.

Good Thing #1:  Good times with the boss(es).

Yes, this past weekend my boss held a cocktail party at his house for my department.  He has two young daughters, and my other boss has one young daughter, so obviously children were welcome.  There was really good food, really good wine, really good beer (courtesy of my guest, Mr. Blue Eyes), and really good company (oh, did I mention I got to bring both my daughter and Mr. Blue Eyes?).  My department rocks.  Bosses are great and the coworkers are fab.  We do fun things like go ice skating on our lunch breaks, and cocktail parties on the weekends.

 

Good Thing #2: A blue-eyed brewmeister.

Sort of a segue from Good Thing #1, Ol' Blue Eyes brews his own beer.  If you know me at all, you know I'd sell my left arm for a good beer.  His last batch was a hoppy peach mead that makes you feel like God has poured peach-flavored heaven straight into a pilsner glass.  As I mentioned in Good Thing #1, we brought this homemade brew to the work cocktail party on Saturday, and it's safe to say that both Mr. Blue Eyes and his peach mead were HUGE hits.  Two points for Gryffindor.

Good Thing #3: A workplace that feels like I'm trapped in a Christmas card.

So it's about negative 500 degrees here, and about 12 feet of snow has been dumped on SW Michigan in the last 5 days, so it looks and feels like winter has finally arrived.  Cheers, Mother Nature (oh, except you're about a month too late).  So I have my special pair of weather-friendly boots at work, and coupled with my sleeping bag puffy coat, I am more than happy to trudge to and fro among the snowcapped buildings at work.  Because when you've got a campus like this, who needs a ho-hum office building?

 Oh, and because it's so cold and because my office is so fab, of course there's a wood-burning fireplace directly across the hall from where I sit.  And so today we got some wood from the fireplace upstairs, opened the flue, and crumpled up some newspaper...

and then someone put the kibosh on starting the fire because it was already halfway through the workday, so we're firing that bad boy up on Monday.  In the meantime, I've got a YouTube fireplace going on one screen while I work on the other screen.  I'm nothing if not resourceful.

Good Thing #4: Exotic fruit.

Persimmon!!

So I like to browse the exotic fruit section of the grocery store lately... I've tried pommelo, ugli fruit (which tastes a whole heck of a lot better than it sounds), and persimmon.  Persimmon... I love persimmon now.  It's like a papaya-flavored tomato.  And it's fabulous.  I like to eat them with salt, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper... mmmmmmm.  Word to the wise: be sure you know exactly what each fruit is before you check out at the U-scan in the grocery store.  It's not fun to have to ask the clerk each time > "What's the name of this fruit I'm holding?"  ... because the clerk probably doesn't know either, because not many people buy Buddha's Hand fruit, because omg that sounds gross.

Good Thing #5: Laughing.

I haven't laughed this much in a long time.  Between Sol, Mr. Blue Eyes, and E-Machine (Blue's little man), I laugh a lot.  Gone are the days where I would find myself crumpled on the floor in a fit of frustration because I put too much dry mustard in my macaroni and cheese.  Mr. Blue Eyes makes me smile.  This man makes me laugh.  Multiple times.  Every day.  And watching him with E-Machine and Sol -- makes my heart do this little number that goes flippity-flip, skippity-skip, all the way to Timbuktu (yeah, I just made that up).  Life is so good.  All you need is love.  And I've got all I need.