Cake? Anyone? Apparently, Fingers Allowed...

Someone brought cake to share at work.

Someone forgot to bring a knife.

Would you dig in with your bare hands to get your share?

Beauty and the Beast Workplace Where A Stress Ball is Watching You!

Every day, I feel like Belle of "Beauty and the Beast," because this is where I work now!

 Of course, if you have a Beauty, you've got to have a Beast, too.

When I started my new job this summer at CaptionCall, we trained in separate partitioned work stations with "walls" that were only about five feet high, and a no-door opening. Each station had a stress ball in it. The other three people who trained with me, all young men, had stress balls, too. But mine had blue rubber fur and an eyeball. 

Yeah, it was watching me.

Do you like stress balls? (Do they like you?) What do you do when you're feeling unsettled? Do you like to squeeze something? Are you a foot-tapper? Do you play with your hair, or hum some random tune?

What is your best stress reliever?

A Surprise in my Yard

REGULAR LIFE:

As a mindful mother, I sent my son Scott a 30th birthday card. (Actually, when I was presented with the opportunity for a sudden visit to Salt Lake City, I was his house guest and left it on his pillow.) On his actual birthday, I did the electronic messaging thingy.

MYSTERY:

 When I got home that afternoon, there was an unfamiliar car in front of my house. I wondered who could be there. When I saw a flyer taped to my door, I figured the car belonged to a person canvassing the neighborhood with flyers. I went inside without a second thought.

SURPRISE:

I dropped my purse and put my keys away and wandered into the kitchen. When I glanced out the window in my back door, I had to look twice. There was a familiar looking person out there. To my shock, it was my birthday son! He'd come to visit as a surprise on his birthday.

(The picture above is birthday boy Scott, me, and Michael.)

I was so glad!

(Zack, Brian, and Michael scraping off "cottage cheese" ceiling)

I was also glad we had new carpet in our living room and a newly textured and painted ceiling, thanks to my hard-working boys!

(Brian sweeping on ceiling texture)

(Zack aplying texture to ceiling)

As an interesting side note, we found this when we pulled out the old carpet. The paint around the edges was to accommodate a piece of carpet covering the center. Since our house was built in 1895, I can only imagine the process of rolling up the carpet every so often and taking it outside to beat the dirt out of it!

Since our carpet was pulled up, our furniture had to wait outside for the new stuff. Michael opted to eat his lunch on part of our sectional furniture which was, of course, outside.

New carpet... picture taken at night with only a lamp on. Mysterious!

-All I can say is, it simply feels good when nice things happen. Sometimes we humans seem to hold bad times in our memories, the struggles we have, days when things don't go right. But I'd rather live like the 99-year-old man I once interviewed for a newspaper article who said, "I've never had any real troubles in my life. My first wife died, but that's to be expected. I have a good life. When we're done talking, I'm going out to work in my shed."-

Live happy!