It's been a week of setbacks, setbacks to our property, our car, my health, and the garden. When things just keep going wrong, I have to do two things: 1) identify those things that are going right in life, and 2) make a forward step somewhere in my life.
As for number one, as I was watering the garden today I counted 16 growing pumpkins and winter squash in my little pumpkin patch. This makes me very happy. I caught myself smiling and humming a tune as I watered and counted. Now that was a great way to change my perspective on my past week. The rest will turn around soon, too.
For the second item, I was at Value Village on senior discount day and found something on my list, a plastic gift wrap storage box in pristine condition.
The manufacturer identifies this as an underbed storage box. But it's the exact length of commercial rolls of gift wrap paper. Fred Meyer sells this for $17.99.
At Value Village, it was marked $6.99. With my senior discount, I paid $4.89. Not too bad -- a $13 discount for an item I needed.
When I finished, I had some torn wrap and tissue to add to the compost, stuff to give away, and only took up one shelf in the closet for our various packaging needs.
One of the things that pleased me the most is I only had a handful of stuff for the trash can, less than what would fill a sandwich bag. When I set out to my task, I brought a grocery bag for the garbage. It turned out that I didn't need that bag at all.
And we now know exactly what we have and that we don't need to buy gift wrap, ribbon or greeting cards for a long, long time.
You know, the satisfaction in cleaning out that closet really helped to boost my mood. Between counting the pumpkins and sorting our gift wrap supplies, I now feel like life is going a lot better than I had previously believed.
I hope your week has been a good one.
