My birthday was on Saturday past and my gentleman associate’s birthday is Thursday, two days hence. My mom’s is the day after that.

It’s Cake week in Sweary-land.

I’ll use any opportunity to celebrate, so having so much opportunity stuffed into one happy week is pretty great. But this week has also been a bit of a challenge. While there’s been goodly amounts of sunshine through my ( home) office window, I’m also looking out the window in the ever earlier twilight and feeling like the short days are going to be hard this winter. And I had a conversation in my own head about my worth. Sometimes those kinds of convos are good, when I take inventory of my skills for goal planning and I feel pretty proud of myself. This was not that convo.

So when a friend gave me an offhand, ” you make [the thing] seem effortless” it was a very welcome compliment.

So what else we got this week? Well, I’ll tell you:

My parents, who still want to take me out for dinner on my birthday, and my Auntie V, who’s always willing to celebrate whatever needs celebrating.

The absolute gift of a man that was Tomie DePaola, and the hundreds of books he published. He’s my favourite author, and although he died a few years ago, every time I read one of his books (and particularly if he also illustrated it), I’m inspired. I may have had the opportunity to pour through one or 5 or 12 of his picture books whilst I relocated them (as part of the Great Paint of 2021). Tomie is the reason I wanted to write, and now that I am a writer, that I continue to do so.

My bossman, who is willing to open up his house to his team so that we can celebrate one of our colleagues moving across the country (but not leaving the company). His very gracious wife, who made us cupcakes and engaged with all of us. She’s so lovely. And, all the colleagues who showed up, excited to be face-to-face after 19 months of ZoomFace-to-Zoomface, and share conversations that ranged from medieval armour to baseball to the politics of HobbyLobby to babies (two of our team has babies pretty fresh out of the package).

Conversations with my sister. No matter how high spirited or low I feel, she makes me laugh and makes the day even better. And truly, the weirdest shit shows up in her feeds, and she always shares that with me.

May your week be filled with fun adventures too, friends. I recommend the cake.