A Celebration is in Order

It might look like I’m celebrating the annual Food & Wine Festival at California Adventure Park, which I was. I was also celebrating a birthday, spring in general, and a few much-needed days off work. I’ve been celebrating UConn’s journey to another March Madness championship game (I picked them winning in my bracket), today’s eclipse, and a new delicious lemon recipe to make with all my tree’s lemons.

There is much to celebrate this spring, and, I’m convinced, there is much to celebrate year-round if we look for it. I’m not great at it, to be honest. And on most days, the optimism with which I wake up (ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN TO MAKE THIS DAY AWESOME!) dwindles relatively quickly when nothing awesome happens. More than that, when lots of things that are not at all awesome—some of them incredibly discouraging, frustrating, or just annoying—happen in place of all the awesome things that felt like possibility a mere hours earlier.

I don’t have a magic bullet for countering this, but on weekends like this, I try really hard to renew my desire to remain optimistic and focus on all the wonderful and beautiful things I see and participate in every day. This past week has been especially significant, because one of the biggest thing I’m celebrating is the official hand-off of my new manuscript. All edits and changes have been incorporated after editor feedback, so now the manuscript is moving on to the layout and typesetting phase…and also the cover! Excited to see what these years of effort will ultimately look like. If it’s anything like this cannoli churro and chocolate marshmallow cookie shake, it will be impossible to resist.