Finding The Happy

We found gigantic radishes in the garden on Thursday.  

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They popped out of the soil all at once, all of a sudden, solving the problem of how will we know if they're ready?

They were very tasty and there were so many of them and Grandma Suzi said they could eat as many as they wanted and that led to some hilarity.

They were too fast for a great picture.

Friday morning, I won three games at mahjongg, a rare and wonderful occurrence to start the day. Taos Bubbe and I had a lovely lunch at Teaspoon, catching up on our lives since November.  I've seen Little Cuter more often than my college roommate who lives across town.  Sometimes life really does get in the way.

The waiter said Welcome back! when I joined Taos Bubbe at the table.  I'd been there twice before, with Amster and various parts of her entourage.  Amster always pays, and she tips very well, so it wouldn't surprise me if he remembered her, but all the rest of us?  

After a few days of cogitating, it hit me that I was older than everyone at all the pushed together tables we occupied, in one case by 70 years.  The rest of them were in their 50's and 40's and 20's, and I was certainly the only one with grey hair.   

Of course he wouldn't forget Grandma.... or Great Grandma.

Friday afternoon, Little Cuter and SIR's Indiana Hoosiers and their Heisman Trophy winning quarterback (who turned down Yale for Cal then UofA) trampled the Oregon Ducks in the Peach Bowl.  That puts them in the national championship game next week.  TBG summed it up best - it just makes me happy to watch it, any and every minute.

That night UofA basketball proved to the nation that they are the team to beat this year.  True, they are boys, and their attention wanders at times.  But there are 8 potential starters and nobody seems to mind coming in off the bench.  They are big and strong and not afraid to assert themselves, they are well coached, and they tell reporters that they really like one another.  

That this game was accessible to our multi-channel-and-still-not-enough cable package was an extra added bonus. Smiles came easily.

After I spent Saturday afternoon filling new plastic containers with the Xmas-When-You're-Going-Out-Of-Town decorations, Dr. K and Not-Kathy came over to watch the Bears.  Like Taos Bubbe, too much time had passed since we watched sports together.  We ate, we talked, we sat outside, then went in to watch Dr. K's Bears put on a performance for the ages.  That won them the right to move on to the next round in the gazillion team NFL playoffs.  

With that and the Wildcats and my new clear storage containers I went to sleep happy.

Big Cuter's 49'ers get to move on, too.  They filled Sunday afternoon with texts and phone calls and exclamations of surprise and delight between TBG and his boy who was playing catch with his boy and a Nerf football.  What goes around comes around, and I went to sleep happy again.

And now it's Monday and I'm trying to hold on to the happy.  I'm trying not to panic when The Doula writes that she's signing up for more ICE watch shifts.  I redact her name to protect the social justice warrior from governmental retaliation as I try to hang on to the happy.  I watch my Senator sue the Navy and my heart breaks for him as TBG turns from the talking heads back to a football game.

The happy is hard to find these days.  I'm going to pick up an old Robert Crais book and lose myself in a fictional somebody else's problems, problems which are certain to be resolved in a way that will leave me happy.  

If I have to orchestrate the joy, I will.