Being mindfully grateful for what I have is really important and something I’m embarrassed to say I don’t do often enough. This week’s Ten On Tuesday is a great reminder.

10 Times You Felt Grateful Last Week

1. When I woke up Saturday morning to all of the dishes being done and…
2. …coffee made and waiting for me at my desk. ( An every weekend occurrence I’m grateful for every weekend.)
3. When I got to spend time in friends’ amazing garden in Queens.
4. When I got to spend time with those friends, eating and drinking.
5. When Scott did all the vacuuming.
6. When our Sunday evening Game of Thrones guests brought spiced wine and Ser Amory’s tarts for us all to enjoy during the season finale.
7. When I ate food fresh from my garden.
8. When I noticed my tomato plants are covered with flowers.
9. When I put up decals on the kitchen walls and thought about how they’re my kitchen walls and I can do whatever I want to them.
10. When I knit on the shawl that is my current project, which uses yarn that was a gift.

I slacked off considerably on my goal of taking a photo every day in May, but as long as I’m still using my camera regularly I’m fine with that.

Today’s topic is a little difficult for me because I stick pretty faithfully to just a few toppings on ice cream, but let’s give it a go anyway.

10 Favorite Ice Cream Toppings

1. Wet walnuts. These are my absolute favorite.
2. Hot fudge.
3. Peanut butter sauce. The top three here are the toppings I stick to almost all the time.
4. Butterscotch. Though here we’re getting into rarely territory.
5. Whipped cream. Exceedingly rarely.
6. Sprinkles. Now and again.
7. Hard chocolate shell. I do have a weakness for a soft serve vanilla cone with a chocolate shell, but again, not very often at all.
8. Brownies. Now I’m really reaching and this is more of an undering than a topping.
9. Pineapple. That one time I had a banana split I remember liking the pineapple. I haven’t ordered it since.
10. Wet walnuts. I know I said that already but I really do love them and I’ve completely run out of other possibilities.

When we moved out of the Bronx, the Old Man gave us a flag. I think I’ve mentioned here before that I was rather touched by that gift. Having a flag outside just screams “home” to me for some reason, so when we moved in one of the first things I did was attach a flag bracket outside the house. Scott and I are both kind of sticklers for the flag code and since we don’t leave our outside light on all the time and we don’t have an all-weather flag, we only put up our flag from sunup to sundown on specific days, rather than flying it all day, every day**. So last year we put it up for the first time on Independence Day. It was windy that day and it quickly became apparent that the mounting job I did on the bracket was sub par. It was wobbly and loose and the screws pulled at the aluminum siding, making the holes looser and more wobbly with each gust of wind.

This past Memorial Day weekend, I finally got around to doing the job right. I used clear silicon caulk, and rubber washers, and I learned what a self-tapping screw is. Now that flag bracket is secure and ready for anything. The screw holes and seams are sealed to prevent water from seeping through and rotting the wood under the siding. It’s a properly done job.

That’s the kind of thing we’ve spent the last year learning: how to do a job correctly. For two slackers who made it through life half-assing everything up until last year, it’s pretty impressive. The surprising part is how much I enjoy it, though.  I’ve become a person who goes back and re-does things that in the past I would have declared good enough and moved on. Good enough is no longer good enough. That’s an unexpected gift the house has given me.

On another note, over the next few weeks or so, I plan to post before and after photos of individual rooms to show how the decorating is coming along. I still have a long, long way to go, but I’m really happy with how the rooms are turning out. I look forward to many more years tinkering on the hill.

*Knocking on wood that this continues.

**It drives me crazy when I see people flying their flags improperly, which nearly everyone does. If they were truly patriotic and not just participating in a kind of masturbatory jingoism, they’d know the flag code and follow it.

Ten On Tuesday: 10 Things You Did This Weekend

1. Worked in the yard. While Scott mowed the jungle we were calling a lawn, I put up cages on the tomatoes, peppers, and peas.
2. Opened the grill for the first time this year. On Sunday we grilled buffalo burgers and cooked potatoes on the grill for warm potato salad. On Monday it was London broil for steak salad with greens from the garden.
3. Had a friend over. Nothing says unofficial start to summer like having friends over to share the bounty from the grill.
4. Enjoyed a birthday lunch. Saturday was cold and rainy, but it was the perfect day to take a dear friend out for a birthday meal.
5. Drove the economy. Saturday we also splurged on the Memorial Day sales by buying a new dishwasher and two new air conditioners.
6. Watched hockey. And the end of the Rangers’ season.
7. Enjoyed the deck. We spent most of Sunday outside. When it got cold in the evening, I put on a sweater and snuggled up with a blanket. We eventually went in when it got dark.
8. Got stung by a yellow jacket. Somehow I managed to get through the first 43 years of life without being stung by anything with a stinger. Having experienced it now, I can say it’s not something I recommend.
9. Watched a couple of movies. Mama one night and Rise of the Planet of the Apes another. I can recommend the latter, but not so much the former.
10. Drank. And experimented with a bourbon/grapefruit juice/honey syrup cocktail recipe. This needs a little more improvement. So sad, we have to continue to drink them to perfect the recipe. What a sacrifice.

Joxer just peed on the bedroom curtains. Last week he peed on the entryway curtains. He’s been peeing on laundry in the laundry room and once on my shoes. This week he’s going to the vet to see if something is physically wrong and then, unfortunately, he’s going to be confined to the downstairs bathroom for litter box retraining. It’s drastic, but this cannot continue.

Xena is scratching the dining room rug every time I turn around, but I can’t even be mad at her because we no longer have the flat cardboard scratchers she prefers because… Oh… Joxer has been peeing on those, too.

It’s times like these that make me laugh when experts talk about how great pets are for relieving stress.

After that disastrous last visit, contact between us was sporadic at best. He rarely called, even for Christmases and birthdays. He didn’t send cards for those occasions, let alone gifts. He seemed content at that point to write me off as a failed experiment and move on with his second family. For the most part, I was alright with that** but I would be lying if I said I didn’t grow up with daddy issues. Inability to trust men, a certain “moral looseness,” desperate need to be liked, and on and on. A classic case, really; one from which it took me a long time to recover.

But recover I did***, and that’s why today when I found a link to my father’s blog while saying happy birthday to my uncle on Facebook, I didn’t fall apart as I probably would have fifteen years ago. Instead, now I find myself reading through it with a kind of sick fascination and I feel like I finally, finally, finally understand something I’ve known intellectually but not in my heart: there’s nothing wrong with me, but he is a complete screw up. He didn’t leave me and do the things he did because of me, he did them because he’s a total loser who even to this day, at the age of sixty-five, can’t take responsibility for anything that’s gone wrong in his life.

I have three failed marriages and four children(one who hates me, two that are totally indifferent to me and one that adores me because I have not disappointed her yet).

Guess which one I am? The thing is, at this point in my life, I don’t even hate him anymore. The only thing thinking about him makes me feel is tired and, now that I’ve read about his life, vindicated. Perhaps he actually has three indifferent children.  Reading through his pity party blog posts has, I think, left me with the ability to shed that last bit of clinging doubt that maybe it was my fault.

So thank you, Uncle G. It turns out that you gave me a gift for your birthday.

*That I won’t go into now but have done on the blog in the past, and may again in the future. But this isn’t about that.

**Because of the aforementioned transgressions.

***For the most part. I mean, I’m a functional human being, so that’s recovery. I’m still shy and don’t trust people easily, but I’m also not living in a shell anymore.