The word breathtaking is a cliche, but the sunrise was so lovely this morning that I only realized I was holding my breath when I started to run out of air. I suspect it wasn’t me finally breathing that made the heron fly away — at the same time Zelda pulled the leash out of my hand and rustled through the leaves — but I was sad to see it go. Then it settled on an overhead branch and annoyed a squirrel, making me laugh. A day that starts with incredible beauty and laughter probably has no place to go but down, but I’m going to be more optimistic than that.

This is my birthday week — I turn 50 on Friday! — so I’m being really nice to myself. Or trying, anyway. I decided to give myself a present every day. Socks on Sunday. On Monday, I got my “Nevertheless She Persisted” t-shirt from Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, which I decided counted. Yesterday, I set out to buy hair ties — yes, I’m not being elaborate in my gifts to myself — but my dad bought me a gluten-free butter pecan cupcake, so that was my present instead. Today, I don’t know. I’m really hoping to get some writing done, but… well, I guess that’s how I’m not being nice to myself. I’ve been really beating myself up about not getting more done over the past few days, like that’s ever done me any good at all. But I am going to endeavor to find some way of being nice to myself today. Maybe it’ll be the hair ties.

I did manage to add an email subscription field to the blog. Right there, over on the left hand side, above the mailing list subscription, you can enter your email address if you’d like to get email notifications of new posts. Personally, I would hate that. An RSS reader, like feedly, lets you subscribe to lots of blogs and read them at your convenience instead of having notifications pile up in your inbox. But I’ve been informed by relatives and people who try to follow posts on Facebook that I could make it easier for them to find new posts if they could subscribe, so subscribe away. I do warn you, though: I am not going to feel guilty for cluttering up your email by writing multiple posts in a week if I have lots of things I want to write about. On your own heads be it!

In other boring business things, I’m going to start adding Amazon affiliate links to the bottom of my posts. If you start your shopping at Amazon by clicking on an affiliate link, I’ll get a percentage of whatever you buy for the next few hours. The items don’t have to be related to anything on my site or my posts. So if you read a post of mine and think, hmm, maybe I should buy some hair ties, and go to Amazon and while you’re shopping there, stumble across a really good deal on a $600 vacuum cleaner and buy that, Amazon might give me $6. That would be nice for me and more to the point, it would make my blog a much better tax deduction. Yes, I did my taxes yesterday. No, I probably shouldn’t have done my taxes during a week when I was trying to be kind to myself. So it goes.

I’m actually not at all down about turning 50, although this post does sort of sound like I am. My brother (aka Best Brother Ever) has given me a fantastic birthday present, which I will collect in May; R is visiting me this weekend so I get to spend time with him; and honestly, everyone should turn 50 feeling so good about how they’re spending their life. I think I’m just frustrated today that I have too many things I want to do and not enough time to do them. And I’ve wasted too much time on things that don’t really matter, like, why, oh, why, are the two Subscribe buttons different sizes and how can I make them be the same size? Answer: no idea, no idea, and I could have spent three hours writing a book instead of trying to figure it out.

I think I will go bake some more granola, walk the dogs again, admire the incredible beauty of the park I’m in (Trimble Park, Mount Dora), and then try to settle in to writing some good words on Grace. Because at the end of the day, those things will make it a very good day.

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