I made a whole bunch of little projects for myself this month. Over the weekend I sat down to evaluate how I did. The scariest stuff was put off until the last minute. A few things just never became priorities. (I’m working on a project for a guy who runs a bar that does karaoke on Thursday nights. “Attend Karaoke” was an actual January goal of mine, which kind of sucks all the joy of this supposedly chill social outing. If I really want to go to karaoke, well, I’ll go to karaoke.)

At the beginning of the month I set out to write down stuff I was grateful for at the end of each day. It didn’t stick. I did, however, manage to cobble together a list of things at random intervals. That is: the first few nights of the year I did it. After that it was, “Crap, it’s been four days!” or more recently, “I’m a sobbing hot mess and this is the only thing I can think of to help me calm my shit.”

Still, it seems half-assed to only write these things down in a private notebook. If I’m really grateful I should publicly declare theset things. Also individually, to each — mostly inanimate — item on my list. Weekend project!

So here they are, in the order that I can find them while flipping through my notebook.

1. My amazingly supportive parents
2. Champagne
3. Travel books and all of their amazing wanderlust-inspiring powers.
4. Supportive, inspiring best friends.
5. The (ever growing) amazing community of bloggers I have come to know and love.
6. Twitter. Sounds silly, but holy shit, I am grateful for Twitter.
7. My siblings
8. Snark Squad
9. Chocolate
10. My space heater. [Our heater failed during the height of the polar vortex. BUT I STAYED WARM. Like a champion.]
11. This notebook. [This blog, too, I guess. Sorry blog, I don’t want you to feel unloved.]
12. Weird doodled on Snapchats from my sister.
13. The stove
14. My dog
15. Fuzzy socks
16. Colored pens
17. All the cool, free ways to learn shit online
18. Playing weird philosophical word games with the log instead of actually learning those things. [Off to the side I scribbled “Pizza is not defined.” I’m sure I found this hilarious at the time.]
19. Google
20. Nail polish
21. DVR
22. …the DVR when it’s working
23. MY CAR
24. Mid-day dance parties
25. The fact that I’ve managed to mostly hold jobs where mid-day chair dance parties can be a thing
26. The fact that I can now do full-fledged out-of-chair-on-my-feet mid-day dance parties.
27. Books
28. Book stores
29. Friends who really do know the right thing to say all the time always
30. Finding my people.

That’s that. A month’s worth of stuff I remembered to write down. It’s neat that it worked out to be 30, but this in no way represents 30 days of list-writing.

Thanks, world, for all that fun stuff. Please let me have more of it next month.

Love,

Nicole