cheap thrills

Tuesdays aren't always my favorite.

I mean, I like the things I do on Tuesdays ... I just do a lot of things on Tuesdays. Towards mid-afternoon, I generally start wondering, will this day never end?

So I've decided it will be a good idea to start looking for the happy little things that poke out at me from the midst of the frenzy that accompanies the third day of my week.

Today:

In spite of my failure to either find or make much time at all for cello practice during the preceding week, my lesson went off without anything quite exactly like a hitch. Good thing I have a patient teacher.

While waiting for my dear, indecisive sister to pick out a pair of sunglasses at Wal-Mart, I discovered a display in the midst of their usually-tacky cheap-jewelry-section, containing some necklaces I actually liked, for (only?) $5.00 each (they came with earrings). I bought two. Happy birthday to me, or something. One of them has a key and a heart on a longish chain. The other (which I really like) has an empty bird cage, and hooked a little higher on the chain, a bird in flight. It made me think of the verse from which I derived the title of this blog. Yeah, I like it - even though the clasp is really quite stiff.

The grain elevator is so busy right now with harvest getting underway, they asked my fellow cleaning girl and me if we'd mind coming half an hour later than usual this evening - which left me with a full fifty minutes (as opposed to the usual ten) free after piano lessons. (I know, the math doesn't work out - I'm usually running late, and I wasn't tonight.) I sat at the park, eating my convenience store supper in a leisurely manner, and reading Douglas Wilson's "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" as the sun sank behind the trees. It was a blissful oasis of stillness and solitude.

A few people were still working at the elevator when we got there, in spite of the recalculated start time. So we got out our supplies, started in the back corner, and cleaned all the offices in the opposite order from what we always, unfailingly do otherwise. (My fellow cleaning girl is a much more systematic soul than I.) Have I mentioned that I love variety? Yeah ... I might be a little too easily amused.

On the radio driving home (at last) around 10:00, yet another hair-rippingly desperate, grief-stricken Daughtry song was immediately followed by the station's deep-throated mantra, "Iowa's best variety" - and then some unidentified number comprised mainly of perky, honking vocals and carnival noise. I laughed.

(meditative pause)

You know, I titled this post "cheap thrills" - but they're not cheap. They're costing me my life. Each one in succession finds me with a little more time behind me, a little bit less ahead. Oh, let me use what's in between for good!

(No, I'm not moody. Definitely not moody. Why would you say that?)