Showing posts with label Tiggs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tiggs. Show all posts

February Delights

Even a short month can hold delight in every day. That is, if you seek it out. Writing "Today's delights" at the top of a dedicated space on the journal page is a bit like picking up a fresh piece of stationery, getting a nice pen, and writing "Dear Person I Care About" at the top of the paper. (Sidebar: This is a thing people do still actually do, and sending or receiving a letter definitely counts as a delight.)

That is to say, once you've started and you've put it down in writing, that blank spot waits for you to fill it with something.

Early this month I finished reading the delightful book Things to Look Forward To: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day, written and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. The inspiration for the book came out of the earliest days of the COVID era (which we're still in, by the way, along with all the other overlapping eras that create a deep need for small delights in our days). She suggests writing our own lists of 52 things to look forward to, or things that bring us joy (or delight). That's one per week, and surely you can manage to find delight at least once a week.

I build a list of far more than 52 things every month, a few at a time. Some delights definitely come up again and again. I "reappreciate" coffee and good food and chocolate again and again, flowers and trees, sunshine and seasons, birds and mosses, hugs and belly laughs, my body reaching up in yoga, our home of four years and the way we've made it more ours, changing weather, shifting seasons, and the night sky. All right there, gifting me with fresh delight every time I pay attention.

February delights:

  1. Good progress on a new jigsaw puzzle
  2. Ordering a tin of Cougar Gold cheese as a gift for family who work for the federal government
  3. The spinning windcatcher in our front yard rotating fast, twinkling in the sun
  4. Snow on the ground when I got up
  5. Mesmerizing flakes drifting down past evergreen boughs tipped with white
  6. Satisfying ping of canning lids
  7. Rich flavor of tayberry jam
  8. Bright sweetness of raspberry jam
  9. Winey depth of blackberry plum preserves
  10. Sitting down after something like 7 or 8 hours of canning
  11. Snow frosting everything
  12. A storyteller's skill
  13. Arriving at the headquarters exactly when two coworkers got there and all of us waving as we walked towards each other
  14. Knitting in a meeting--tons of progress, beautiful colors
  15. Two couples walking our neighborhood loop at different times, holding hands
  16. One of these women saying to me as I left the housing wearing a big teal wrap, "I love that color!"
  17. Walking fast in the cold on a downtown sidewalk feeling as if I were flying
  18. One of the students bringing ginger cookies to improv class
  19. Laughing
  20. Waking to a snow-covered world
  21. The sound of rain on the roof when I don't have to go out in it
  22. Sweet and salty pickled cherries in yogurt with almonds
  23. Blue sky peeking out
  24. Lush flavors of mushroom soup I made
  25. Birds twittering
  26. Having all that counter space to do lots of cooking
  27. How much light our living room holds on a cold, sunny day
  28. Ducks paddling at the shore as waves rolled in
  29. Mossy roof of a tiny sign kiosk with a jaunty fern growing out of it
  30. Fresh zing of homemade raspberry and tayberry jams
  31. Flurry of jays' cries high in the trees as I listened to a podcast interview with adrienne maree brown talking about connecting with the natural world
  32. Curving up in Warrior 1
  33. Buttery-good mushroom soup with oyster crackers
  34. Hot bath
  35. Walking with my sweetie
  36. Moss-covered tree posed like a dancer
  37. My sweetie describing how he'll fix the hummingbird feeder to make it nicer for them to land on with their tiny feet—such sweetness in that thought
  38. The beautiful kitchen light fixture my sweetie made
  39. Being inside warm and dry when cold rain is pouring down
  40. My sweetie making a new bigger platform for Tiggs to perch on so he can watch kitchen action while not on the island or range hood!
  41. Seeing Jupiter in the sky from my bedroom window, then Rigel and Sirius
  42. Birds in the tree and on bushes doing their bird thing
  43. Quiet sense of home stuff moving along while I work: washer and dryer humming and chugging
  44. Printer putting out actual page, not weird tiny symbols and gobbledygook
  45. Black-capped chickadee, perky on the suet cage
  46. Finding the credit card, ID, and transit cards that were hiding in a backpack after a trip
  47. Felting with wool for the first time, to fill a small couple of holes in a favorite blue wool jacket
  48. A nearly full moon shining in the early morning darkness
  49. Morning sun's rays shooting through tall pines
  50. Riding my bike downhill
  51. Full moon in the night sky
  52. Venus shining over the neighborhood
  53. Sun's warmth on a cold walk
  54. Softness of Tiggs' fur
  55. Holding my sweetie's hand on a walk
  56. Spicy tingle of Bengal Spice tea
  57. Seeing 3 other people on bikes as I rode to the office on a very cold morning
  58. Driver who waited in the slip lane for me to bike past uphill, then waved and smiled when I waved at him
  59. Softly falling snow
  60. Energy of an in-person meeting
  61. Little ferns growing out of the moss on the Dr. Seuss tree outside the living room window
  62. Freshly baked bran muffins with melted butter
  63. Speedy help from the data/GIS whiz on my work team
  64. Finishing slides that are the right length
  65. Sweet potato fries with garlic aioli
  66. My body's curve as I reach to the sky in yoga
  67. Warmth of Tiggs on my legs
  68. Fresh homemade oatmeal cookies
  69. Rain, gentle on the roof
  70. Beautiful results of framing a big puzzle I started over a year ago and finally finished
  71. Insistent train whistle in the distance
  72. Hot fresh biscuits with butter and local honey
  73. How great the kitchen counters look (new, after a big remodeling project)
  74. Birds swooping joyously from fence to bush to feeder to tree and back around
  75. Being outside in fresh air
  76. Bright gold tall yolks of fresh local eggs
  77. Satisfaction of pruned raspberry and tayberry bushes
  78. Not needing my coat on a walk
  79. Mossy sculptures in the woods composed of tree limbs and stumps and trunks
  80. Feeling good about finishing a set of slides I need to present to a legislative committee
  81. Belly laughs
  82. Bright yellow leaf on the path in the nearby forested park
  83. "Spread Kindness" on the display sign on the #21 bus
  84. Creamy mushroom soup with lots of paprika, eaten fresh after making with oyster crackers
  85. Frogs' chorus in the night
  86. Crocuses poking up out of a mossy planting strip
  87. The deep cushion of moss, not grass, in that planting strip
  88. Night chorus of frogs bellowing for love
  89. Tiggs playing with an old toy I got out that he hasn't seen in a while, pouncing again and again
  90. Smell of wood smoke on a walk
  91. Walking with my sweetie
  92. Sitting in a coffee shop/bakery with the hum of people
  93. Assyrian flavors in lemon labneh, roasted cauliflower steak, zoug
  94. Tiny purple flower blooming by the sidewalk
  95. Sleeping in, warm and cozy
  96. Trying a new recipe that's a keeper
  97. Sea salt dark chocolate truffle
  98. Coziness
  99. Rain on the roof, a steady drumming
  100. Flowers blooming on the capitol campus
  101. Unexpected scent of lily of the valley on a downtown street
  102. Homemade tomato jam and Cougar Gold on crackers
  103. Birds twittering on the suet cage
  104. Tiggs making that chittering sound from his tower seat by the window where he can see those birds
  105. Bird going for a ride on the wind spinner in the yard
  106. Hearing a barred owl hooting in the rhododendron park midday
  107. The way the blue paint I picked for the bedroom picks up colors in a painting and a framed jigsaw puzzle hanging on the wall
  108. Perfect timing to roll through stop signs on uphill stops riding home in the dark (which, by the way, is legal in Washington thanks to Safety Stop legislation enacted in 2020)
  109. Biking at night
  110. Spring! Blue sky and sun! 60 degrees!
  111. Trees budding
  112. Flowers blooming
  113. Calls of a jay
  114. Tiggs fully stretched out in the sunshine (on my puzzle table)
  115. Tiggs doing his "roll and scroll" on the living room rug, tipping his head back to look at us, beaming happiness and chirping/talking
  116. Glorious warmth of the sun!
  117. Flowers blooming in so many places
  118. The way the rust orange of a thrift store jacket went perfectly with a top, scarf and hat I already owned
  119. Taking a selfie with my mushroom "pinecone" stump friend just because
  120. Beautiful glassy water in the bay, ducks floating here and there
  121. Stars and planets in the night sky, and being able to see those overhead in our neighborhood
Putting this list together tells me even more about the themes and delightful resonance than I originally thought of when I started the post. Listing them chronologically lets me recognize the way I tune into seasonal shifts. 

And so many! I don't aim for a specific number per day since I can't force delight. It just comes, every single day, as long as I expect it.

Reading this list makes me feel delight-full. What's on your list?

Related Reading

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2022 in Review: Blogging and a Bit More

2022 was a pretty quiet year in my blogging life until the last few weeks. I lost my writing mojo in 2020 when the world went dark, other than the writing I needed to do for work, and only this fall and winter did I start making an effort to write again. 

We still have a global pandemic and people still die from COVID-19 and its Greek-numbered variants. I've been vaxxed, vaxxed again, boosted, boosted, variant-boosted, and I still mask in crowds, stores, and mass-transit settings. The number of people doing the same has dwindled; sometimes I'm the only person wearing a mask. 

I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me telework 100%. I do travel a bit, eat occasionally in restaurants, shop in stores (masked), and occasionally have a social life with people I know are vaccinated and maintaining precautions. We kept up the grocery online order/pick-up habit because dang, that's lower stress than going into a store full of lots of people coughing, especially this time of year with the "tripledemic" in the news (COVID-19, flu, respiratory syncytial virus, with that last one usually only producing mild cold-like symptoms but breaking out much more seriously this year, especially in children). 

I haven't had COVID-19 yet that I know of. (I do have my suspicions about a few days of feeling under the weather during which I kept testing negative after attending a big conference and receiving a lot of texts and emails from people I'd talked with saying they had tested positive.) Nor have I had the flu, a cold, or any other contagious respiratory illness. Masks are awesome.

You would think that with all this non-social time on my hands I would have done more writing. It's been more like "what do we binge next?" at our house, to be honest, plus a lot of books read. At any rate, here's 2022's short list:

In May I tried to plan ahead for a special round-number birthday celebration: Counting up the Years. This was a lot of fun, coming up with things I could do that don't all cost money; instead they cost the far more rare and precious elements of time and attention. 

As part of my job, I get to coordinate with the office of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on the proclamation for Bike Month. I wrote Bike Everywhere Month Rolls in May for the WSDOT Blog to share that—especially happy to do that in the year in which the Washington state legislature passed the historic Move Ahead Washington package with record-breaking levels of investment in active transportation and public transportation and dedicated future funding from a new carbon tax. That same package included a directive to WSDOT, where I work, to apply Complete Streets principles on all our projects, which is game-changing in a way that adds to the value of those new investments.

Both my long list of fun ideas and my bike riding took a turn for the worse September 1 when this happened: Broken Wrist, Dang It! No Riding for a While.

Revisiting my bike blog revealed I had a problem numbering in the tens of thousands that required drastic action in subscriber management: So long, spammers (with apologies to real people). [Honestly, this one isn't worth reading; noting it only in the spirit of full disclosure of lessons learned.]

I was delighted to write State Active Transportation Plan receives multiple awards for the WSDOT Blog. The plan my team worked on starting in late 2018 got slowed by the pandemic, and became final toward the end of December 2021. Over the course of 2022 the plan won state, regional, and national awards. And for an extra dose of woohoo, the new Move Ahead Washington transportation investment package wrote the plan into state law as a resource for identifying gaps in walk/bike/roll networks to prioritize for investment.

In November when things got weird with Twitter, its potential demise looming, I grabbed the archive of the many faces of Tiggs in The Kitten Chronicles, Year One, The Kitten Chronicles, Year Two, and The Kitten Chronicles, Year Three. I share a picture or funny story every so often, adding to a thread I started the day we brought him home. He can be a real poophead sometimes—ask me about the holes he's eaten into a lot of good merino wool clothing—but he's also brought joy.

Now I was on a roll and Twitter was still there to inspire a bike blog post: What’s in a Name? Acoustic or Analog, Regular or Traditional Bicycle*. (But just in case, I started up a Mastodon account, @BarbChamberlain@toot.community.)

I rolled right into wanting to do something to reflect on the National Day of Mourning (labeled Thanksgiving on the federal holiday calendar) and Native American Heritage Day and compiled a post I've had in the back of my mind for a couple of years now: “We Are Still Here”: Indigenous-focused Bicycle Programs.

I treat that long four-day weekend (since I get those days off) as a chance to do cooking that takes time, although I don't try to get an entire fancy meal on the table in one fell swoop. Thus I dove into Vegan Cranberry Caramelized Red Onion Orange Chutney Recipe Experimentation.

My morning routine includes reading poetry. Along the way I've encountered more than one poem that somehow involves bicycles. Hence, “I think/therefore/I ride.” A Bike Rack of Bicycle Poems. Like the Kitten Chronicles, that started as a Twitter thread. I invited suggestions, which yielded some of the poems in my post, and I'm continuing the thread so I expect another post in the future. I started a second thread of transportation poems and that's likely to result in a post as well.

Watching TV with my sweetie, a reference to the Internet of Things sparked some wordplay. We agreed that An Alphabet of Things seemed possible, and a while later I put it together with some of our thoughts and only one bit of research (to find the X word).

As the year drew to a close, I marked the winter solstice during my morning poetry-reading time, which led to Winter Solstice Readings.

My relationship with resolutions has varied over the years. This year I'm making it both fun and easy by thinking in terms of "joy snacks" in Commitment, Bite-Sized and Tasty. To help people get rolling by bike (or some other climate-friendly mode) whether or not they're "resolution types", I rounded up my blog posts over the years that discuss forming new habits, tracking/not tracking your riding, and the nature of commitment in New Year, New Mode(s).

The last day of the year held so many simple pleasures—joy snacks:

  • went for a long walk with my sweetheart on what proved to be a sunny, beautiful day after a week of rain, to downtown Olympia for a coffee date and a stop at Peacock Vintage; 
  • rode Zelda the e-bike on my first bike ride since breaking my wrist, woohoo!; 
  • baked a delicious vegan dish, a tofu/caramelized onion/mushroom filling in a pie dish lined with thin slices of yam; 
  • sewed trim onto the hem of a coat that Tiggs had chewed a hole in, hiding the mended spot and making the coat wearable;
  • did yoga, making today one of my "triathlons" (walk 5,000 steps or more, ride my bike, and do yoga all in a day); 
  • finished this blog post; and
  • enjoyed red wine and delicious chocolate at the end of the day while relaxing on the sofa.
A very satisfying way to close out 2022 indeed.




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The Kitten Chronicles, Year Three

 Year One, Tiggs was our little fuzzball growing growing growing.

Year Two, Tiggs turned into a teenager.

Partway through Year Three, Tiggs has turned into a somewhat grouchy, sometimes cuddly cat. Lack of human contact beyond us as his adoptive parents in the first year under COVID conditions probably affected his socialization in ways I couldn't have anticipated, as I've never had an unfriendly cat before.

I also note that I did what so many parents do, which is to take lots of pictures early and then slack off as they get older.

I recorded some of our nicknames for him. We've had a ton of fun with this.

  • Mr. Stripey Pants (I think this was his very first nickname)
  • The Tiggmeister
  • Little Man
  • Buddy Boy
  • The 6-inch Tsunami
  • The 8-inch Avalanche
  • The 10-inch Tornado (he kept growing)
  • Poophead (most frequent, if we were logging usage)
  • Tiggalator
  • Mr. Tiggs
  • Butthole (catbox reference)
  • Master Blaster, Master Bottom Blaster (another catbox-cleaning refernece)
  • Meow Mix
  • Cute Boots
  • Boo Cat (associated with a particular leaping movement on hind legs, front paws outstretched like a Scooby-Doo ghost)
  • The Stripiest
  • The Paunchy Predator
  • Catnip Evermean
  • Fur Face
  • Killer Kitten with Murder Mittens (coined during our move from Seattle to Olympia)
  • Kitty Boy
  • Pounce and Bounce
  • Mr. Investigator
  • The Merino Muncher (because he chews holes in my clothes like a giant Mothra)
  • Floor Shark
  • Ankle Shark
  • Paunchy Boy
  • Striperino
  • Striperoneous
  • Paunchus
  • Stripeness Everpoop
  • Poop Noggin (classing up Poophead a bit)

For more on the reference to a broken hand, a post on my broken wrist. 

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The Kitten Chronicles, Year Two

Continuing with my capture of The Cuteness That Is Tiggs, Year 2. Year 1 gave you the first dose of kitty cuteness.

I managed not to flag the first tweet of Year 2 correctly but I'm capturing it correctly here. "Year Two" definition, by the way, is based on the Tiggs Year (TY), which begins on July 13 of each year and ends on July 12 of the next year.

We have a long, long list of nicknames he has acquired along the way: Tiggalicious, the Tiggmeister, Mr. Stripey Pants, the Tiggalator, Hall Monitor (when he braces himself to pounce in the hall), and many, many more. The latest is Quick Paw McClaw, or Quick Claw McPaw. Both seem to work. 

That's our sweet Kitters Boy! 

 

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The Kitten Chronicles, Year One

When we brought the little fuzzball home I naturally tweeted out a pic of our newest family member. And then another. And then another.

And the next day.

And a couple of days later.

Thus the Kitten Chronicles were born: a thread of tweets with pictures and stories about the fuzzball who became Tiggs short for Tigger in about 3 days.

Along the way a dropped phone and some backup file kerfuffles meant I lost the original images. And now Twitter appears to be in its death throes thanks to a spoiled, pouty billionaire who bought it and proceeded to drive it into a ditch, so my sole source of kitty photo memories could disappear.

Not if I can help it! I'm grabbing screen captures and building blog posts to chronicle the chronicles. I'll embed the tweets but those could vanish so I'm also saving those screen grabs in case I have to swap them in later. Herewith, the first year with the adoptee from the King County Animal Shelter who has become such a big part of our lives.

The Tigger YouTube video I shared in that tweet
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