Rockin'

Today's Beautiful Thing is a compliment. When I was using the ATM today, a 20-something year old guy walked by, turned to me and said, "Your hair totally rocks!" I thanked him and smiled for the next half hour.

Girl Stuff

Today's Beautiful Thing is a fresh set of red nails and red manicured toes to match. The polish color I chose is called Blackberry, but it looks more like Raspberry. ;)

A New Project

Today's Beautiful Thing is a group project. A group of us are working on something that we hope will help a lot of people. It's really fun to talk about ideas and watch it grow as more people come on board.

Family Lunch

Today's beautiful Thing is sharing lunch with family. We had my mother-in-law and father-in-law over for a BBQ lunch today. We ate, gabbed, and took Ace to the park for a walk. We all had a great day.

A New Life

Today's Beautiful Thing is my workmate S. She and her fiancee R are getting married today. Congratualtions!

Pot Luck Lunch

Today's Beautiful Thing is a simple pot luck lunch at work. Two people had birthdays this week. What better reason to celebrate?

Being Included

Today's Beautiful Thing is being included. I joined a group a couple of months ago. This group is now branching out and doing some new stuff and they invited me along. The shy little girl inside me is very pleased about this. :)

An Angel on my Shoulder

Today's Beautiful Thing is a little Frenchie snoozing on my shoulder. Zzzzzzz...

Family

Today's beautiful Thing is family. Since my cousin's wedding, we've all been e-mailing a lot lately, trading photos and compliments. Most of my cousins live just far enough away in traffic, to make seeing each other regularly difficult. I've really been enjoying our e-mail conversations this week. Love you guys.

A Good Book

Today's Beautiful Thing is a good book. There's not many things in this world I like better!

Pups' Best Friend

Today's Beautiful Thing is J. She spent the night with Lulu & Ace while we stayed away overnight. That was a beautiful thing to do. :) Thanks J!

A New Member of the Family

Today's Beautiful Thing is my new cousin Brandon. I hope he and Staci have a long and happy life together.

Creating

Today's Beautiful Thing is creativity. I took the day off to decorate my cousin's wedding cake. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the creative outlet. :) While the design wasn't a complicated one, I was glad to give Staci what she wanted.

Failure

Today's Beautiful Thing is Failure. Really! Watch this great (very short) clip and see why. Without failure, there is no success! So go on out there and try something new. Walt Disney did, and look what he accomplished.

Niceness!

Today's Beautiful Thing is T. She traded days with me at work so I could do something else this afternoon. I'll cover for her Thursday. Thanks T! Here's a Hello Kitty for you. (Because T loves Hello Kitty :) )

4 Down, 3 to Go

Today's Beautiful Thing is being right on schedule with my cake baking. I baked two 8" layers and one 12" layer yesterday, and one 12" layer today. If all goes well, I'll bake one 16" layer Wed, Thurs & Fri and decoate the cake Friday too!

Bonus Beautiful Thing: The house smells heavenly these last of couple days!

(Pictured: some cake layers I baked for the hubby's birthday.)

Calling in Sick

Today's Beautiful Thing is being allowed to call in sick. While whatever is wrong with me doesn't feel so beautiful, the freedom of being able to call in sick is. I had a job for 10 years where you had to be half-dead in order to call in sick, and even then they questioned it. I am fortunate to work for this wonderful company and to have such caring supervisors.

Confirmation

Today's Beautiful Thing is my nephew & Godson, J. He was confirmed today and we are so proud of him. His older brother, R, was his sponsor. I teared up as I watched these two handsome young men walking up the aisle of the church together. Congratulations, J!

Getting Stuff Done

Today's Beautiful Thing is finally finishing my shopping. Next Saturday, my cousin is getting married and I am making her cake. Last Saturday I bought all the supplies and today I bought all the ingredients. Now, I just have to do a little every day after work, and I'll have it completed Friday night. Then we can leave right on time Saturday afternoon. Well, I can hope!

New Friend

Today's Beautiful Thing is my new friend V. She's an amazing person and I'm glad we met. :)

Lunch Room Fun

Today's Beautiful Thing is lunch in the breakroom with my officemates. Yesterday there was much laughter coming from the break room, so today I thought I'd join the group. We had a nice time exchanging stories. There was much laughter today too. :)

Randy Pausch

Today's Beautiful Thing is Randy Pausch. I saw him on TV tonight and he blew me away. Please watch his You Tube video, The Last Lecture. It will inspire you. I plan on picking up his book as well. I can't wait to read it.

Free Breakfast!

Today's Beautiful Thing is Jamba Juice. They have new breakfast items on their menu and they gave them out free before 10 AM this morning. Since they were busy and I was in a hurry, I told them to give me the most popular item of the day, which turned out to be the Chunky Strawberry. It was very good, but so filling I didn't want my lunch! When I read the nutrition information, I figured out why. It has 14 grams of fat. (There's peanut butter & granola in there!) If you like strawberries, bananas, granola, and peanut butter, you'll like it. It was mighty tasty. But if you're watching your fat intake, the granola toppers are a better choice and the yogurt blends would be the best choice. But I'm not complaining. It was both tasty and free. What a generous offer.

Accompishment

Today's Beautiful Thing is accomplishment. My supervisor told me we absolutely, positively had to complete a task today. Many things came up that took away from the time I'd set aside to complete the project, but we still did it. Yay!

(Pictured: the Chinese symbols for accomplishment.)

Finally!

Today's Beautiful Thing is weigh-day...other wise known as Sunday. Four Sundays ago, the scale said I lost 36 pounds. The following Sunday it said I gained three. I knew I didn't, but it stressed me out and I started eating junk--which I what I do when I'm stressed. I started weighing myself on other days in between. The scale went up and down, but never dropped back to the 36 pounds lost position.

But, this week, I made a conscious effort to watch my fat and calories again--scale be damned--and today I'm back to 36 pounds lost. Yes!

Sizzling Goodness

Today's Beautiful Thing is a skillet of sizzling chicken fajitas! After we got our taxes done (Yay! Crossing that off the to do list is Beautiful too!) we went out for Mexican food. The simple goodness of grilled chicken, onions & bell peppers, fresh pico de gallo and hot corn tortillas was out of this world tasty!

This Blog

Today's Beautiful Thing is this blog itself. I've been a little down the last month or so. I'm grateful that posting something every day here at TBT reminds me to find something beautiful every day. All I have to do is look back in the archives to be reminded that good things happen every day. They really do, you know.

Canadian TV

Today's Beautiful Thing is a silly little Canadian sit-com called Corner Gas. The silly scripts and quirky characters always make me smile.

Clean, Clean!

Today's beautiful Thing is two clean pooches. They had a bath special at the vet today and we took both Ace and Lulu for the works. They not only look nice, but it's obvious they feel good too.

Finding My Way Back

Today's Beautiful Thing is getting back on track. The last couple of weeks, I haven't been as good as I want to be on my diet. But the last couple of days I've been making better choices. My calorie and fat gram count are going down. Hopefully tomorrow will be just perfect. :)