I am grateful for the music of Vienna Teng. It inspires me to live braver and bolder. Her music is suffused with empathy, embodies grace and generosity, and is constantly evolving and growing, exploring the world we live in and our impact upon it. It’s what I wish I could do with my art form, with my life.

I am so fortunate that Vienna was willing and able to be a part of our wedding ceremony. Recessing down the aisle hand-in-hand with my new husband and surrounded my all our friends and family to the opening strains of City Hall is one of those memories I keep close to my heart.

Photo Credit: Emily Takes Photos. Seriously, hire her. She’s rad.

Stanford’s Big Game win today (whoo hoo! I briefly cared about football, long enough to text a quick gloat to my dad at least) reminds me to be grateful for my entire Stanford experience. In particular, I am grateful for the friends I made there, who are still dear to me and to each other years, advanced degrees, marriages, kids, new jobs and cross-country moves later. i am grateful to Dave, for being the only nice person I met at ProFro weekend, and for convincing me to go to Stanford in the first place, even as i tried to talk him into picking MIT over Stanford. i am grateful to Valerie, for inviting me to eat dinner with her on our first day of freshman year when i was too paralyzed with shyness to even enter the dining hall on my own, to Lauren for asking to join our draw group and for that time we tried to raise baby chickens she smuggled out of a lab in our dorm room, to Joe for marrying Lauren in the backyard of our Oxford house, to Grant for allowing us to spend half of sophomore year plotting to set him up with Valerie, or at least letting us think that it was our idea, to Mari for, omg, just being YOU, to Paul for mailing cans of salsa to us in Oxford and for that time that his band dedicated REM’s Easter Bunny to me. i love you guys.

Today i am grateful for knitting. I can watch as much trash TV as I want, and as long as I’m knitting I feel productive! Also, I love to give handmade gifts that are actually nice, and my sheer meticulousness serves me well when it comes to something like knitting. A lot of it is just following directions and doing math. I am grateful to my friend Becky for teaching me the basics (and also for inspiring me to take up running, and for the years of friendship, too).

Voltron the Bear

Today I am grateful that I have access to quality, affordable healthcare. And I look forward to a day when our country recognizes that access to healthcare, like education and food and shelter, is a right, not a privilege.

Today I am grateful for cooking dinner at home. The simplicity and comfort of leaving behind our computer screens and smartphones and todo lists for an hour or two and preparing simple, delicious good together. I am grateful for all the delicious things that have come from my two favorite good blogs, smitten kitchen and 101 cookbooks, and for the wonderful vegetables we get from our CSA, Angelic Organics.

today i am grateful to have a snug warm house to live in, can afford my heating bill and have warm coats and clothes to wear. it was 11 degrees when i woke up this morning, and the worst i have to think about is how to bundle up warm enough to go for a run. i am grateful to the city shelters who open up their doors to the people who don’t have somewhere to go and would freeze if they stayed on the streets on nights like this.

Today I am grateful that the offer we made on a house was accepted! It’s a distressed foreclosed bank-owned property being funded with a government-backed renovation loan, which is basically like jumping straight into advanced home-buying with out passing go or collecting 200 dollars first. Still, if we make it through all the paperwork and the renovations, by spring we’ll have a classic Chicago greystone two-flat to call our own!

today i am grateful for the little things. i am grateful for being inside on a rainy stormy afternoon. i am grateful for steaming cups of tea, chocolate, the internet, stealing time to write, for newly-organized closets, and sunlight breaking through the clouds after the storm.

this meme is popping around facebook right now and while i sometimes find these things overly self-indulgent* (who really cares what’s in my fridge right now or the last 3 dvds i watched?), i did enjoy reading other people’s lists, so i let Hannah assign me a number to report back.

8 things you might not know about me (but that i’m still willing to tell the entire internet)

1) Northern California and Chicago are the two places that feel most like home to me. no matter which one I’m in, I miss the other. obviously the people, but also the physical place. i get unexpectedly homesick for a particular street corner, the gate leading into a running path, the scones at an eastbay cafe. it’s the ordinary things that pop into my head with unexpected longing. while i miss my nearest and dearest people in my home state of idaho, i don’t miss the place in the same visceral way.

2) i have an irrational, almost paralyzing phobia of vomit. (this fear does not extend to cat vomit, however, only human. i’ve been thoroughly desensitized to cat vomit by our two bulimic cats). i’m also afraid of stillness, going bald, spiders that are too big to squish, swimming pool drains, and waking up to discover that every other human being on the planet has mysteriously vanished or died.

3) i went to college to study computer science, but came out with a degree in directing. i have never directed a play, but i have produced or staged managed or worked in some capacity on more than 65 productions in the past 13 years.

4) i’m meticulous about spelling and punctuation when i send text messages. i can’t stand abbreviations. i am, however, terribly lazy and inconsistent about capitalization rules. i cannot explain the difference.

5) i am a laundry disaster just waiting to happen. (and frequently i do happen). i once made an entire load of costumes smell like fish. i’ve lost count of the number of times i have turned the whites pink, and i ran a ballpoint pen through the dryer twice in the same month.

6) I misspelled my own middle name until I was embarrassingly old (like, 12 maybe?). whenever my older brother was mad at me he would pronounce my full time with a staccato rhythm to the syllables: JEN-IF-ER-CATH-A-LEAN-GA-DA! I guess that was the only time I heard someone pronounce my middle name, and he always added an syllable to the middle of Cathleen, so I learned to spell it phonetically: “Cathaleen”.

7) my best stupid human trick is that i can count in binary on my fingers (up to 1023 before i have to add in toes, and they aren’t really that well-articulated). i thought i invented this while goofing off in high school math class, but according to wikipedia, it’s an actual thing.

8) i took up running 7 years ago and since then i’ve run 6 marathons and 13 half marathons. a couple of people have credited me with inspiring them to take up running. i’m pretty proud of that last accomplishment though i never set out to do it. someday i’d like to be a running coach.

* besides, what is a blog for if not self-indulgence, right?

today i am grateful that i inherited three amazing sisters by marriage. growing up i felt terribly left out that i had only brothers and no sisters. i even tried making it a requirement that matt dress up like i girl if he wanted to play with me and my friends when he and i were about 4 and 8 respectively (i had little success in this). what i didn’t realize is that i just had to wait another 28 or so years to get my first of three sisters-in-law. now all three of them are very dear to me and i am so very lucky they are in my life.