Gratitude Journal.

I'm keeping a Gratitude Journal. Learn more about it.

• Below freezing weather bringing favorable conditions for building a backyard ice rink. Hoping to get it full before the big snowstorm this week.
• The Lorchcast. ("You gotta get a body on Merve!")
• Seeing a growing pile of presents under the tree.
• How picking up scattered items and vacuuming makes the house look clean and tidy.
• Another Blue Jackets victory.
• Forgiveness and understanding.
• Coffee I.O.Us.
• Recognizing that it's time to move on.
• Slane's neeEEeeds. She is so earnest and emphatic.

Gratitude Journal.

I'm keeping a Gratitude Journal. Learn more here. What I am grateful for today:

• Looking around the house and saying to myself, "Wow, there's some cleaning to do," but deciding that spending time with family is more important. And cleaning a little, anyways.
• Forgiveness.
• Recognizing strengths and weaknesses in myself.
• Ice scrapers.
• The person who shoveled our sidewalk.
• Coffee and donuts.
• Streaming video.
• Goodnight Moon. 
• Vince Guaraldi's "Christmas Time Is Here" from A Charlie Brown Christmas. 
• My parents' 40th anniversary, coming soon.

These posts are also appearing as notes in Facebook and friends are commenting. Thanks for the comments! Please continue to comment and use the posts to share what you are grateful for. (Yes, I know that sentence ends with a preposition, but I'll leave it like it is.)

Gratitude Journal.

I'm keeping a Gratitude Journal. Read the backstory here. Things I'm grateful for today:

• Music. 
• Snow boots.
• Our daughter, her endless curiosity, and her ability to stay warm without a coat.
• Just enough snow.
• Coffee.
• Patience as we re-write the Christmas letter for the fourth time.
• "Silent Night." Such a simple song, yet so rich with meaning.

Gratitude Journal

Things I am grateful for:

• Building a habit. (This is the third post!)
• The generosity of strangers and exceptional customer service. We went to pick up a rotisserie chicken last night from Hy-Vee. They were out, so the attendant at the deli counter called Wal-Mart and Fareway to see if they had rotisserie chicken. When they didn't, she boxed up a chicken's worth of herb roasted chicken for me. It was a god-send on a Tuesday night coming back from a four-day trip.
• Talking through tough decisions, thoughtfully.
• Candid conversations. Venting without being toxic.
• Cookies and milk.
• A good pillow. My pillow.
• Hugs.

Gratitude Journal.

I'm building a habit of keeping a gratitude journal. Here's what I am grateful for today:

• Conferences. Exchanging ideas and networking with colleagues can be a rejuvenating experience.
• A great co-presenter. We took time to prepare what we'd say and how we'd say it.
• A wonderful audience who attended our presentation. They came with great questions and responded warmly to our content and our call to action to collaborate in small groups.
• A roof over my head and a warm bed to come home to. Wow, it's cold out there.
• Arrogant Bastard. It's a tasty beer.
• Facing tough questions and being honest that I don't have answers for them - yet.

Starting a Gratitude Journal

With this post, I am blowing dust off of my personal blog. Perhaps this is getting a head start on New Year's resolutions? This post also heeds the advice of several of my favorite blogs. Penelope Trunk, Bryan Caplan, and Gretchen Rubin cite research that a gratitude journal can help you be happier. I can certainly use reminders of the blessings and good things in my life, so I'm going to give it a try.

Gratitude Journal - what I'm grateful for today:

• Getting out ahead of the storm.
• Snow.
• Staying in the same hotel as my conference. I can enjoy the power and beauty of a winter storm from the comfort of my hotel room.
• The generosity of colleagues. John and I have good company for a long drive.
• How easy it is to read good, interesting ideas. It's inspired me to write this post.

 I'll post my journal here when possible (and appropriate). I encourage you to do the same in the comments. You can also start one and share links in the comments. Let's do this together.

FAT WASH MANURING (Fun with Anagrams)

The excellent CBJ blog Dark Blue Jackets has posted anagrams of current Blue Jackets players. Using the anagram generator, Here's a few more:

The anagram for Columbus Blue Jackets? JUMBLE SUCKABLE SCOUT, which could be a metaphor for the first decade of the franchise. And the anagram for their mascot, Stinger? Resting.

I went ahead and did anagrams for some of the contributors to Puck Daddy, one of the great hockey blogs on the internets.

Puck Daddy: DUCK PADDY
Greg Wyshinski: SKY WHY SNIGGER
Dmitry Chesnokov: SHOCK DIRTY VENOM
Sean Leahy: ANALYSE HE
Ross McKeon: MOCKER SONS
Matt Romig: GOT TRIM AM
And the best one belongs to Ryan Lambert: BALMY RANTER (a much more appropriate nickname than “Two-Line Pass”)

RSS - what I'm reading...and what I have stopped reading.

I have not written a post here recently because I am blogging about parenthood, working on a website, sharing what I read, and Twittering. Over the next few months, I will use this blog to share details about what I am reading and not reading.

The excellent blog Signal vs. Noise inspired me to do this, and Jim Collins inspired them. The idea? A stop doing list. I have written thousands of to-do lists and most of them had things left undone. As SvN puts it, "You need the discipline to discard what does not fit."

These upcoming posts will be an exercise for you and me in discipline. I will begin with my Google Reader. It has replaced most of my newspaper reading and web browsing because I can direct RSS feeds directly into it. (One blog I read, Jewel of the Prairie, recently discovered RSS and gives a great explanation of how to use it. This blog also has a feed.) Recently, I have found that I have subscribed to more things than I have time or energy to read. My first exercise in "stop doing" is unsubscribing from RSS feeds of blogs that don't fit me.

Unsubscribe: Urlesque. This blog bills itself as "Exposing bits of the web." It finds great images and videos but feels like the blog equivalent of that person who forwards everything - scams, funny, pics, jokes, and the warning that Congress is going to take away Sesame Street. It has some great posts - Its collection of the 11 awesomest pictures on the internet was...awesome - but it's more meh than meme to me. I actually dropped this feed a few weeks ago.

Subscribe: My current go-to funny site is Autocomplete Me. Google's suggestions are sometime not what you would expect. Did you know this?

 

Exactly. Now go and see what Google will suggest for you.