:: A Year Of Good Things : 89/366

Day 81 : Today’s Good Thing Number 1 is Michelle’s birthday! Do you know Michelle Mackintosh? She is my super clever friend. She designed two of my books, Sew La Tea Do & Make Hey While The Sun Shines. She’s designed LOTS of other books too and is parent to one of our very favourite fluff balls, Bronte.  Michelle and I were born a few days apart, so we think that makes us even more special friends. We are bit esoteric and magical like that. When it suits us!  Michelle really is a good thing. Do you remember when we visited her life, here?  Good Thing The Second is that I had a really lovely dinner with Clare and Lucy in Carlton. We had the best time and I feel pretty luck to have so many amazingly cute and smart ladies in my life. Le sigh. Lucky me!

Day 82 : Catching up with Michelle. Hm. There is a theme here, right? It’s the MM fan club! On this day, the good thing I did was to go to Babka and have a Beryl with Michelle. That sounds weird, right? Do you know what a Beryl is? A Beryl is a GOOD THING. It’s a handful of vodka infused raspberries, tumbled into a glass and topped up with sparkling white wine. HOW GOOD is that?!  Also, we had a slice of perfectly tart lemon tart. That was good too.

Day 83 : The Good Thing on this day was Brooke and her new baby Spike (5 days old by this time!) dropping in while they were drying their laundry down the road.  We had nice chats and tea with soy and honey. And we went for a walk to visit Victoria around the corner. And then we went to Slowpoke and met up with Shanaka (Spike’s dad!) and had coffee and further important chats about how amazing babies are!

Day 84 : People Of Letters was the Good Thing on the 84th.  Have you ever been to this literary event? I am not very literary, but I did speak at Women Of Letters last year, and I was keen to head along and see Zoe Foster and Hamish Blake and Megan Washington and Benjamin Law.  Unforts Megan got stuck in Sydney and Ben got stuck in hospital, but we still had an ace time and got our socks blown off by John Safran and Father Bob singing their version of Somebody That I Used To Know (Some-Bobby That I Used To Know) accompanied by a standard poodle. That was a VERY Good Thing. Gemma came along with me and we met Gourmet Girlfriend, Frankly Feisty and writer Carrie Hutchinson there too. I got a kiss from Ms Hardy AND Ms Hart, so I left bathing in the warm glow of poodles and smooches.  You MUST go to this event if you haven’t yet. It’s a teensy $15 a ticket! Oh my!

Day 85 : Mondays and Tuesday are big writing days for me. I mean, every day is a bit writing day, actually, but Monday and Tuesday I try to knuckle down and do a bit of a 7am til 10pm kinda thing. I take breaks, don’t worry, but I really devote myself to getting lots of things down and tap tapping away at my computer for the better part of both days. I plan what I need to do for the week and either draft up or complete those thing. It’s sort of like laying the framework for a calm, successful week, I guess. It’s the bare bones of  getting stuff done. That is a Good Thing.

Day 86 : Tuesday afternoons are my fave day of the week.  I take a couple of hours out of the aforementioned writerly schedule and I take Ari to his hip-hop class.  He loves that class. I drop him off and go wandering around The Prahran Market or The Chapel St Bazaar for 50 minutes and then I sneak back and steal a peek at the kids doing their thing. To Rihanna or Justin Timberlake or Katy Perry. It’s so cute.  It’s a Good Thing to see kids doing stuff they love.  (The other Good Thing about Tuesday afternoon is that we get to pick up our CERES Fair Food box! Gosh. It’s really good. We’ve been eating tons of delicious salads and Cam really likes the fruit. It’s crunchy. Like fruit should be!  GOOD THING!)

Day 87 : Wednesday? I was still writing. That’s my job. That’s a Good Thing.

Day 88 : Dinner and Drinks with the JustB ladies, Nikki and Bianca.  This was on Thursday.  There was a blogging conference on Friday, so we got to meet up and say hello in real life, instead of on Skype! I caught the tram from Brunswick Street to St Kilda (in itself a very Good Thing at 4pm) and walked along the Esplanade to The Stokehouse. We met up nice and early, at 5pm, except they were late, but that didn’t matter, and sat on the foreshore. It was warm, breezy and just freaking gorgeous. We had lots of snacky, healthy eats and drank cold white wine and got to know each other.  Argh. It was SO lovely.  We saw two swans swimming in they bay : GOOD THING.  We saw an amazingly beautiful sunset : GOOD THING.  We had a great time.

Day 89 : I spoke at the Digital Parent’s Conference about making the leap from Blog To Book. It was fun and I met a whole chunk of nice bloggers who I had never met before (like Eden and Baby Mac and Veggiemama)  I sat up the back with Bianca and Gourmet Girlfriend for most of the day and we had such a great time.  I scored a bit of a snuggle with Problogger http://www.problogger.net/and ate a lot of Gummy Bears.  Those are Good Things.  

Day 89 (Part 2) : The other Good Thing that happened on Day 89 (yesterday) is that the announcement came through that I got a new job!  It’s been brewing since my birthday, but it’s official now. I am the new EDITOR of rad lady website JustB! Gulp! Yay! I’ve already started and it’s going to be great. It’s pretty amazing to get to work on a site I already love and to be able to make it into something I will love even more. I hope you love it too. Sometimes I feel like there aren’t any women’s sites that mix fun stuff with newsy stuff and some arty/designy stuff and a bit of interesting people stuff, and do all that in a non snarky, not judgey way.  I’m trying for that. It’s a pretty loose brief, right?! I know I can do it!

How are YOU? Do you need a lie down after all those Good Things?!  Do you need some tea with soy or honey? Do you need a squeeze? Or a gummy bear? Have you been doing Good Things, too?