Two cups of coffee. French press Folgers on the dark side. Four creams total but no sugar. The music is the morning after the rain. Clothes and dishes washed for the most part. The floor is swept enough. Buggs will not be ignored.
Today I am grateful for a swim, a walk and a late start. It's a print, Pinhoti and Como Sessions weekend.
Today I am grateful for dark chocolate, cashews and cold glass bottles of Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino.
Even the name of the place is good and the drive is doable and after the world has seemingly become unrecognizable or just turned upside down - it wasn't a bad idea to break out and see some courage and listen as a team fan brought his game to football's home town.
Today I am grateful for an accomplice, permission, a stage and an opportunity to listen.
I must get outside, listen and see as the day opens itself. Communication is key but the cat seriously leans so I try to sneak outside without him hearing me. Later they want to see him. As they should. It's their cat but oh no, he's found me.
His name is Buggs. Not like Bugs Bunny. Like Buggs, you bugging me.
Today I am grateful to find that if I let him be he'll finally just settle into the noises until he becomes a part of them until of course he needs more attention and then he shouts into my right ear.
Still, I keep typing so he goes off (to kill a bird).
She does explore with a push of feet and climbing and she wants to read and we fight about it. So I say, "Okay. You read that one and I read this one."
And I read it to the cat puppet and the cat puppet and I make a big deal of my book.
"Mine," she points.
So I give it to her.
I used to fight with him because he would want to read the book about the farm equipment and I was all Horton and Seuss at that time but then I read Seuss last night.
Today I am grateful for shrimp, cake, writers, books, a birthday and a call from him.
I have to write about it, send those words to her and we make a t-shirt with the store credit I got from working. Como Sessions with Angee Montgomery on Moon Hollow Farm. Included is the pork sandwich in a spicy vinegar topped with the right slaw, one side, large sweet tea heavy $15 combo.
Today I am grateful for my new rooms, their visit, your voice, the dinner, that nap and her clearance of the cat who is now Jafar the tiger.
"They dressed out the deer and hung it in the junipers to cool and they made a foray on the slope for wood. They built a fire and they cut paloverde poles and cut forked uprights to lay them in and Rawlins skinned the buck out and sliced the meat in strips and draped it over the poles to smoke. When the fire had burned down he skewered the backstraps on two greenwood sticks and propped the sticks with the rocks over the coals. Then they sat watching the meat brown and sniffed the smoke where fat dropped hissing in the coals."
That was Cormac McCarthy describing the beauty of eating meat on page 90 of All the Pretty Horses.
How long should a kindergarten video about bees be? means I'm asking the wrong question. How long can it be? feels different.
Farkle is his name, but he does seem to have a cold of some kind. We have to ask her what she thinks. The turtle is already gone.
Today I am grateful for footage and ideas and deadlines at midnight tonight because if you say a day - I get to midnight.
1. Nice people.
2. A good bathroom.
3. A breakroom.
4. A picnic table.
5. Good pay.
6. Health insurance.
7. Music.
8. Temperature controlled.
9. Space.
10. Required focus on colorful creations and bonus points for cleaning.
Meanwhile at the house is the hollering outside the window of which comes from a being of great hollering skills but that guttural thing it does with that one is beautiful. It stays but only if they name it.
Today I am grateful for a job with Fridays off to clean screens and finish the honeybees thing and money to buy cat food on top of a once a month food stackage splurge of a true patty melt above tater tots which are under chili then cheese. Ordering means standing outside on a beautiful day and that onion tasted good even on the ride home. The sweet tea was so sweet but didn't make it past the office.
May's cheat is a pork sandwich. Top price of a heavy combo with one side and a drink is $15. Tom's banana pudding was extra. The sauce is a Memphis vinegar and spice. This is not a Goggins approved challenge, but I think he'd give me once a month. Still, I ain't telling.
Memorial Day weekend will be the artist of charcoal and dirt, the colorful teenager and the fast food lady. Como Sessions is barbeque?
Today I am grateful for a new morning, another chance, extra time and a way to get where I'm going.
Today I am grateful to sit and talk with old friends, enjoy the sunshine, welcome a new soul to the property, clean out a closet, help daddy and see him.
She goes straight to my closet with a catalogue in her hand. "You wear too much black," she says. "It's all black," she stretches her arms out.
"You don't understand. Black is understated and slimming and what a photographer used to wear. You're photographed. You loving pink works."
"But what about this?" She points to a pale pink cardigan, soft, expensive.
"That's good," she smiles.
And the honey bees were upstaged by a red eared slider who we need to get his water temperature set, some rocks to stand on and what do they eat.
And that one.
We did get some footage and we are going to send at least some of it to that classroom but that turtle now named Bosco has become a story for that one.
Today I am grateful for stories and chickens and dogs and bees, this website, the teacher who sent us and the front screen door.
Even if it's during turkey season when you only get six weeks, a good rain feels like the kind of gift you need. Everyone needs a day like this under a tin roof but at some point we're going to have to make a film about honey bees.
What do honey bees do when it rains?
Today I am grateful for a project. Plus, in our book we've been introduced to John Grady, Rawlins and Blevins.
This book and these characters and 2011 Tumblr and 2013 Medium. Yeah. Though Blevins has already been introduced, page 48 tells us who he is and I think we fall in love with the kid.
"He pitched it up underhanded. It rose spinning in the air, very small against the blue. They watched it waiting for him to shoot. Then he shot. The billfold jerked sideways off across the landscape and opened out and fell twisting to the ground like a broken bird."
He gets Rawlins' respect.
It is having enough energy to go and watch people I love push past those limits while I'm eating a Bubba's bacon cheeseburger with a loaded baked potato accompanied by an iced sweet tea in one of those styrofoam cups and sitting within the most perfect temperature at one of the most beautiful places in the whole wide world. Only thing to make it any better was if we'd taken the win last night.
I am grateful for the opportunity to be there, to see love under lights and cheer our babies on.
Yeah.
Today I am grateful for fresh strawberries from a local patch and Stevie Ray Vaughan's serenade on my commute.
It was one of those moments when someone who is looking less for story and more for how a writer can force you to hold your breath and then release it slowly as you repeat those lines again thinking, there. There it is - the reason I read McCarthy.
"The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he'd been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been."
I am grateful for a writer. (on repeat)
