O Happy Day

Ahhh, the Big Day. My Day of Birth. The excuse I have for everyone to pay special attention to me! (Because, you know, I like it to be all about me!)

It's marvy today, I must say. I can get used to this sort of treatment. Easily.

Have spent part of the day farting around with my new BlackBerry (thank you, M!), at one point on the verge of chucking it out the door due to my inability to get it functioning correctly. Turns out that if you just click around all over the place and get frustrated, it eventually starts working on it's own. It's just that smart. Its ability to overcome user error is quite impressive.

The BlackBerry is a wonderful tool in that it will allow me to streamline the media functions residing in my purse to one small, handy tool. Phone, calendar, contacts, music, e-mail, Web browser, camera...about the only thing it doesn't do is my laundry, and I'm pretty sure they're coming out with an upgrade for that.

Lunch today was Dewey's Pizza (mmmm) with a dessert of gourmet cupcakes from Jilly's (double mmmm). I'm so stuffed right now I'm contemplating crawling under my desk to take a nap. Notice I said cupcakes, plural. My friend thought it best to buy an assortment of cakes, so we could all try different flavors. What that really means is that we all ate way more cupcake than God ever intended. Urp.

All this and it's still early afternoon. What a fantastic day, eh?!

I read something recently that really resonated with me, and so I'll share it. Consider it my birthday present to you.

To live a happy, fulfilled life, stay away from toxic people and surround yourself with nourishing people. Well, duh. But the information went on to explain how you can identify toxic vs. nourishing. Not that it's all that hard, really, but it's nice to have a refresher every once in awhile. And this is such a simple way to do it.

Toxic people are one (or more) of the 5 c's: cheap, crabby, critical, complaining or cruel. Ick. Who wants to be around any of that?!

How do you find the nourishing people? They:

• always have something nice to say about you...no matter what you wear, how you look or what you do.
• make it safe for you to ask any question or share any feeling. They don't beat you up for being yourself.
• allow you to be fragile when times are tough...never taking advantage of you when you're already down.
• challenge you intellectually, helping you think of new and better ways to handle situations.
• are tender and gentle, giving you lots of validation and a limited amount of criticism.
• bring fun and laughter into your life.
• walk in when everyone else walks out.

I am so fortunate to be surrounded already by nourishing people, which is birthday present enough. So, what I'm going to try to do is to be a more nourishing person back to my nourishing people.

Cupcakes have nourishment, don't they? I've got a few left, if anyone wants some...