I am not happy when I am not happy. I am not happy when I can’t concentrate on the positive and shove the things that bother me aside in favor of the good things that surround me. Small prickers under the fingernails of my mood are most definitely torture and I have the urge to yank them out and remove them as quickly as possible. I don’t LIKE being in a bad mood, a grumpy mood, a sad mood.
Today, a concentration on good things: sleeping in, smiles, sunshine, swinging down a city street, shopping (sales on books!), sweets in a cozy café, scoring the one goal that won the game (Karin), singing and joking and laughing with Martin (who also bought books), walking the dog one last time before Cate came to pick her up.
One of the nicest things about Sweden in February is the BOKREA. It’s a week-long country-wide book sale. Every bookstore participates and every other kind of store gets in on the action, too…either by discounting whatever books they might have on hand, or putting other things on sale. The bookstores were brimming with people and Martin and I scored a couple of books each. Two of the ones I picked up I’ve been waiting for, for a long time, so that made me happy.
Other good things right now: being able to get answers to practically any question anyone asks with a quick flip of the iPhone case and a direct line to Google and Wikipedia.
Last night we were supposed to have an AWC sushi night, but it got cancelled since everyone else bailed and it was just me and the kids on the sign-up sheet…so rather than disappoint them, we went to sushi anyway, and dragged Anders with us. But, as it turned out, when we got to the restaurant I had designated for the event, it turned out to be a good thing it had fallen through: NO TABLES. It was a take-away place! Doh! Imagine if we’d had 20 people like LAST month! That would have been tamago on the face for sure! Upon realizing that we couldn’t sit down and have dinner, we decided to walk back over to where we’d parked the car and eat at HAI instead (another really good sushi place), but they were completely packed and had no tables.
“Do you have a reservation?” the harried waiter asked me. “Um, no,” I said, “It was kind of last minute.” He apologized, and after checking, told us they had no places AT ALL for the entire evening. When I gave him a shocked look, he shrugged and said, “It’s payday.” Then Anders thought of Rose Garden Supreme, a huge Asian buffet place not too far away. They serve Chinese, Thai, Sushi AND Mongolian BBQ. Perfect! When we got there, however, the waiter asked us, “Do you have a reservation?” …uh oh, I thought. We replied in the negative, but after checking, he said we could have a table, but we had to be done in an hour and 15 minutes. NO PROBLEM! So we got our sushi after all.
Geez, that was a long lead-in to what I was GOING to tell you, which was just that Martin, while we were eating dinner, asked if we could go to Japan some day. When I said, “I suppose so, why?” and tried to say that sushi in Japan isn’t exactly like sushi in the West, he said he wanted to go because they have restaurants with monkeys for waiters. What? Seriously? Out came the iPhone and a couple of clicks later, sure enough, we had proof that yes indeed, there is a restaurant outside of Tokyo that has (or had, the articles were from 2008) a couple of monkeys that serve food to customers. Hrm.
And even more good things: Payday and extra bonus money, waiting for a couple of books to arrive, finding birthday presents for family members, trying to plan summer vacation dates with my mom, big fat raucous pheasants in the backyard. There! That ought to hold me for a bit!
What nice things have you got in YOUR weekend?
*Title from a quote by Winston Churchill