Today I am grateful for:

• Turning in the project. I never thought I’d miss Projects, after I left school. I especially never thought I’d miss them after I left a regular office job, where the topics of the projects weren’t even all that interesting. It’s really been a long time since I’ve had anything other than a self-imposed deadline, and so I’ve forgotten how delightfully satisfying it can be to do a lot of work and then hand the work, complete and well-done, over for someone else’s judgment. I shall bask in the satisfaction for a moment longer, while I wait to find out if my efforts have won a nice little grant (oh! I hope they have).
• Recipes. I have stacks of them. I’ve devoted some recent time to organizing them. Both the recipes and organization thereof make me happy.
• Getting my car out of the snow bank, just minutes before the snow vacuums came through, so that the street in front of my house got perfectly cleared out.

We should give that elk a name

Today I am grateful for:

• Helpful neighbors. There is a black hole on the corner that traps every car trying to turn onto that street in about 4 feet of snow. I lost count of how many people I saw my neighbors (also Dustin) helping dig out of that snow trap. They are good people.
• Realtor.com and Zillow.com, for enabling my current obsessive pastime. The first time I house-hunted, I’d never seen any of the houses we visited until the moment I stepped through their front doors. Can you imagine?! I spend every moment of my free time now looking at listing photos and daydreaming. Also lightly judging. I mean…

Please forgive me if this is TOTALLY your style.

Today I learned: how to write budget justifications. It’s been that kind of day. I also read about jungle cruise boats “sinking” in Disney World, balloons popping in the Hagia Sophia, and how much Istanbullus (there! That’s an interesting thing I leaned – people living in Istanbul are called Istanbullus) love cats.

This is your brain on science

Today I am grateful for:

• Fresh air. We live in the mountains where the air is the freshest. I don’t remember to appreciate it often enough, and then my house is suddenly full of fumes and I miss it very much. At least it’s just on the other side of this window.
• Multiple viewpoints. My folks came up the hill to look at a potential house with us today. Dustin and I think alike in many ways, but my mom’s brain is 100% practical, and my dad is brilliant at realistically assessing the possibilities. Also, they bought us lunch.

Today I learned: your amygdala is the part of your brain that learns fear and tells you to panic when that thing you’ve learned to fear happens. Your frontal cortex is capable of talking your amygdala off the ledge, using reason to convince the hyper-emotional amygdala that your fear is not reasonable (assuming it really isn’t). This isn’t the same as becoming unafraid. One you learn a fear, you never ever unlearn it. If the connection between your amygdala and your frontal cortex was severed, your fear would return at full force as if you never learned any coping strategies. That’s all we ever have to deal with fear: coping strategies. Our brains are so weird. (This bit of info courtesy of the book Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, which is so much more interesting than I thought it would be.)

Today I am grateful for:

• Not having any dogs in the fight. I attended a P&Z meeting tonight whose purpose was to solicit public comment about ordinances restricting vacation home rental, specifically in light of how basically everyone on town is now listed on AirBnB. As an actual b&b owner, I am interested in this topic, but I find I have no firmly fixed opinion. Not so, the other attendees. Some were angry, many defensive, all who spoke were impassioned. I’ve been on that side – as the one speaking passionately and as the one trying to moderate such a discussion, and I hate it. Being an active player in such roles brings out the most potent of my anxieties. I recognize the importance of such discussions, and of the passions that make me sooooo uncomfortable, but today I felt very very grateful that it was not my turn.
• My puffy jacket. Dang, it’s cold outside.

Today I learned: in Deadwood, you can be fined $200 per day for having an unlicensed vacation rental. Though can and will be are not the same.

Too old to even be pagan

Today I am grateful for:

• Guests going home. Yes, they fund my grocery budget, but it’s also really great when they all go home and leave me all alone in my house once in awhile.
• February limes. It’s pretty cool that I can get a lime in February in South Dakota.

Today I learned: a sarcophagus dating to about 600BCE and associated with the cult of Romulus has recently been discovered buried under the forum in Rome.

Today I am grateful for:

• Matt Klein. Northern Hills realtor extraordinaire. He took us all over today, investigating houses in Deadwood, Lead, Spearfish, and Sturgis. It turns out I have a penchant for picking real disasters. I’m looking for a little disaster, but we’re talking places that turn out to be on the brink of condemnation. He was patient through all the cracked foundations, leaking roofs, broken gas lines, tilting floors, moldy basements, and that one house that was straight-up sinking. He might think we’re nuts, but he’s here to facilitate whatever flavor our madness happens to be.
• Graph paper. All paper should be graph paper. It is in France! I miss that. I love drawing floor plans. I spend the evening redesigning the kitchens and bathrooms of the least-horrible house we visited today. I’m great at that. Let me know if you have a horrible kitchen you’d like me to fix. I’ll even bring my own graph paper.
• Chocolate-covered marshmallows. A treat mom brought me from Trader Joe’s. It took almost more self-control than I possess to prevent myself from stuffing the entire box into my face like a greedy chipmunk in a single setting.

Today I learned: there is a bookstore in the French embassy in New York. I’m going to go visit it some day.

The strangers who pay my bills

Today I am grateful for:

• My guests. On this the first day the inn has been open since January 5, I am grateful for the people who finance my eating habit. I’m often a little down on them, a little grumpy about them, or a little over them, but after a nice break (and with the reports from my checking account being rather dismal), I remember that they are good and useful and will be the reason for my (currently theoretical) future freedom. Thanks for wanting to sleep in my beds, folks!
• Dustin. He helped me make a super fancy valentines breakfast, even though he already gets up early all the other days of the week. This morning, he did an especially admirable job stalling for me while I waited for the heart popovers to come out of the oven. The guests were far more impressed with his stories than they were with my popovers. Winning all around, really.
• Open houses. I am genetically predisposed to love looking at houses. Dustin asked me to explain this today, and so far I can’t, but today’s visits to two open houses marked the official start to my quest to find a new domicile. The houses I saw were super weird and I am totally charmed. I can’t wait to go look at more houses tomorrow.

Today I am grateful for:

• Tanya. My house is full of an evenly distributed metric ton of dust. Tanya took one look at it, did a little sweating, then rolled up her sleeves and spent the next eight hours issuing eviction notices. Yes, I pay her, but there is no one I’d rather have at my side in this battle.
• Dustin, vanquisher of sidewalk mud. There was a lot of it. Compliments of the same circus responsible for the inside mud. I mean dust. Dustin attacked with shovels (several of them), an ice hoe (I’m sure it has a better name), and several buckets of boiling water. It was majestic. Dear downhill neighbors: sorry that mud flows downhill…

Water!

Today I am grateful for:

• Ray the plumber. We hired him for a big-ass job with a weird-ass timeline, threw many proverbial wrenches into the process, and he still got my water turned back on with (barely) enough time for me to wash my dusty, dusty, disgusting dusty house before guests arrive. I know how hard he worked to make this happen, and I hope he takes a few days off now. And they comes back, because my water is so hard right now…
• Plumbing. Did I maybe mention this yesterday? I’m still not over it. And now I have it in my own house too!
• Kepler, my long-lost cat. He’s been in excellent hands for the last few weeks, but it is awfully good to have this ridiculous cat back.

Today I am grateful for:

• Clean water, especially the hot stuff. Every once in awhile, I am blown away by the miracle of modern plumbing and water sanitation. You guys! How amazing is it that any time we want clean, drinkable water, all we have to do is walk across the room and open a tap?? Better yet: hot showers. Clean, hot, and available any time of the year with zero effort on my part. So easy to take for granted, such a huge impact on our quality of life.
• Long-distance pep-talks. Thanks to my mother and friend Megan for the remote moral support regarding my house’s current lack of running water, hot or otherwise.
• Fluffy snow. Pain in the ass to keep the sidewalks clear when it won’t stop coming down, but it’s so, so beautiful.

Today I learned: what those metal nubby things in the middles of our sidewalks and driveways are for! That’s where the City can turn water on or off to your entire house! They’re like, little magical key holes that unlock the power of sanitation, and mine got unlocked today for the first time in a month! Hopefully all the pipes will be connected when I turn up tomorrow morning with my mop.