A Light in the Darkness

The lovely Tamika over at the Write Worship gave me the Happy 101 Award at the end of last week—her timing could not have been better.



As a result of the advice from a retail tech squad pup with the best of intentions but a shortness of insight, we’ve experienced a catastrophic meltdown of our laptop. The sad thing is that this techno savant probably could have erased the worm that threatened our computer in five minutes, but altruistic in nature, he wanted to save us mere mortals $200. Rather than taking the computer in, he handed us just enough information to ensure that we’d strip the computer of its brain, leaving ourselves with a shell of hard plastic and no clue how to re-boot. Poor senseless genius, he obviously doesn’t understand that, if you are not him, it takes a PhD in physics, another in molecular biology, and a minor in computer science to get these things up and running again.

Add to my gripes above, a torturous, unsuccessful and unresolved search through every cupboard, drawer, box and file in the house trying to find our network password, and it will give you a gist of the mood around here. The password, I fear, has evaporated, poof, just like all the data on the laptop--we now own an HP Pavilion on which you can play Minesweeper, Solitaire and Mahjong Titans, and tha-tha-tha-that’s all folks!

In this grumpy state, imagine how good it felt to fire up our five-year-old desktop to find that I am a recipient of Tamika’s award. I need to focus on good things right now and if one of them can’t be the tech guy showing up at our doorway, this instant, I’ll go for the list required by Happy Award winners:

Ten things that make me happy. Are you ready?

1. The six colorful origami stars, scattered at my cubby by my daughter.

2. My husband, honestly, the nicest man around.

3. The ocean. You see it in so many of my pictures. There’s something organic about this passion for the water, it lives in me. There is never a time when I first see the sea that I don’t take a deep breath, smile and sigh.

4. Chocolate bread pudding, apple pie, making bread, spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove, blueberry crisp--a marinated steak, grilled medium rare, accompanied by oven-roasted potatoes and a glass of red wine on a Saturday night--fish baked to melt-in-your-mouth flakiness in foil packets, so as to not stink up the kitchen. Oh and lately, when the pizza crust I’m trying to perfect relaxes enough to stretch across the entire pan. It would be way too easy and cheating if I made an entry for every food that makes me happy, so this whole thing counts as one, even though it’s technically about nine. Food? It’s all happy.

5. Middle Passages and my followers.

6. Waking up on a weekend morning with nothing on the schedule.

7. Sipping fresh ground coffee, light and sweet, while sitting at the counter, paging through the newspaper early on a Saturday in the winter, or up at the bistro table at the back patio overlooking the rock garden in the summer.

8. Reading a book in front of the blazing fire toasting my slipper-shod feet, on the day listed in #6 above

9. My daughter’s smile when I agree to her request for a cup of coffee from a downtown café after picking her up from school (for her it’s only a sometimes thing--I started at age sixteen after all), and our subsequent drive to the beach where we watch the water, comment on the invariable dog-walkers and catch up on the day while slurping the hot brew.

10. White snow drops, blooming in the garden in early March, the first sign of life emerging from our dormant earth.

And, ta-da, an extra:

11. Knowing that for a mere $100 more than the amount it would have taken to eliminate our computer virus, a tech guy will arrive, sometime between 12:00 and 4:00 on Friday, to repair our laptop.

Now, I’m supposed to give this prize away to a bunch of blogs, but I’m only going to give it to one person--Glen at Differences with the Same Likeness. Glen is a loyal follower of Middle Passages. When I check my comments every day, he’s one of the first there and his remarks are upbeat, positive, and make me happy. So who better is there on which to bestow this award? He says he’s not a writer, but boy, he can come up with some dead-on descriptions. Yea Glen. Thank you for reading and commenting--and thank you again Tamika, for wonderful timing, and an award that improved my mood one hundredfold.