Gratitude

Things for which I am grateful:

Kiehl's Skin care (specifically the Argan Cleansing Oil, which I use instead of soap and the Creme de Corps, which keeps my skin from completely withering this time of year) http://www.kiehls.com/Body-Moisturizers/body-moisturizers,default,sc.html Pricey, if you're not familiar, but not completely obnoxious and truly great stuff.

On-line recipes (remember when we used to have to buy BOOKS to find new recipes? seriously!) Am currently a big fan of Cooking Light and Vegetarian Magazines data banks (a little slow to load, but great healthful recipes, I made a vegetarian Italian Wedding soup last night that is DEEEEVINE!)

Goodwill (which not only supplies me with clothing, but is also conveniently located on my way to work and has a super helpful drive thru drop off feature that is allowing me to purge (remember?) a box or two daily.

The fact that 2011 calendars are marked down to 50% after Christmas. How handy is that? And there's still a pretty good selection left at my local B&N....I picked up the one pictured above by Moleskine which is a super fun company with lots and lots of organizing tools. They have a really fun series of City Notebooks on the major metropolitan areas complete with maps and sections aimed at planning a visit. For example, they even include these cool tracing paper overlays that you can put on a map page and then trace a route. I'm doing one of these for a girlfriend who is going to Paris in March. Am going to plan each day for them, complete with where to eat, where to shop, and things to do (museums, hot spots, etc.) I'll give them a bunch of options based on different neighborhoods they can explore and then they can just pick and choose which "day" they want when they get there. I did this for myself a few years ago, only I did it in spreadsheet form b/c these groovy notebooks did not exist yet. This will be MUCH more fun! http://www.moleskineus.com/moleskine-city-books.html

The huge blogger community that exists to both introduce new things and remind me that opportunities ABOUND!