Pretty and Grateful Thursday

It's a glorious day outside, and inside me I'm glorious too. My sunburn is fading with no itching so far. The only bad part is that while it fades, it turns a weird shade of dark red/purple, but I can live with that. I also have on my new dress today, which makes me feel light and breezy and pretty. So there's two things to be thankful for, and I haven't even gotten to my list.

 1) Water, and my new healthy eating pattern. I haven't been perfect-- for instance, I had cinnamon toast crunch for breakfast this morning (what, I was in a hurry, and I can't stand for it to sit in the pantry uneaten just to go bad)-- but for the most part, I've switched my cookies and crackers and chips for strawberries, string cheese, and carrots with hummus. I've also started drinking a nalgene bottle full of water per day...

and have so far not had a coke zero since Sunday. I'm not planning on cutting coke out all together, but I do want to cut back. I'm feeling much more awake that I had been, much more energetic.

2) Going back to number 1 real quick. I was just reminded by my admin assistant how glad I am to have a positive relationship to food. I can recognize that I'm eating unhealthily and change it without going overboard and without freaking out about my weight or my calorie count or anything else. Food is nourishment, food fills me up with the vitamins and minerals I need to live a good life, and healthier food simply tastes better to me, most of the time. She's gone over the deep-end, counting her calories, eating plain turkey and carrot sticks for lunch, moaning and groaning all day if she happens to give in to a bite of cookie, talking about how she's going to have to run it off that night. Her facebook status updates always seem to involve food. A new employee mentioned one day in passing, jokingly, that she worried about her food too much, and five minutes later she was coming out of the bathroom with red eyes. She's thin, but not anorexic. Yet. Emily and I keep a close eye on her.

3) Wisteria. Although it attracts bees and wasps, it's so pretty. That purple is just so vibrant. There's a tree outside my office door that's wrapped up in a vine, and right now it's covered in the blue-purple hanging blooms.

4) Tough decisions finally being made at work. Our controller talked the talk and walked the walk when we hired him, but he hasn't proven to be what we need him to be. We need a decision maker, a tough cookie, someone that will stand up for us to outside vendors and to the boss himself, but he's more of a wall flower, waiting for direction from those above him before moving an inch. Plus, he's messed up a couple of very easy bills lately. It's gotten the boss's attention, and mine, and he's put me back in charge of our money again. The controller is still here at this point (he happens to be my boss's partner's friend... sigh) doing basic bookkeeping duties. We're going to bump him down to a bookkeeper, with a significant pay cut, or he has the option to quit. I'm thankful that the decision is made, because it was a hard one to make. It means more work for me in the meantime, but it's in the best interest of us all. Now we just have to have that conversation with him.

5) Finding inner peace. I'm not saying I've found it yet, but I'm inching closer. The big hurdle I need to cross is realizing that change won't kill me and that I can't prevent it, no matter how hard I try. I know this, logically, but living it is a whole other story.