Today I've had a super-lovely day, perfect or near-perfect (it would have been more perfect if I had gotten up earlier to enjoy it at a reasonable time).

Outside, I think is the last warm weather of Chicago before everything turns grey and spitecold. Not that I mind grey and spitecold that much, but it does seem to last for a very long time, which is my main gripe, and the primary reason why I enjoy every last drop of the dregs of the warm weather and leafy avenues and orange smell of autumn. And today, it has been blustery-warm, blue-skied, and when I walked across the street with lh, and a wind hit, and I pretended I was being blown backwards, lh instantly started doing the same thing, and a man sitting behind the wheel of his car at our stopwalk with his window rolled down started laughing, and I looked up to see his smile, and really.

I spend too much time forgetting how beautiful everything is.

I went to the beach with lh and walked along the sand, got stuck in mucky goo, remarked on how few people there were, climbed up a small-pier, and felt a few of the sculptures people have sketched into the falling-apart wharves all along the lake.

Everyone looked peaceful today. Not super-happy or crazy with glee, but so peaceful and calm, stretched out in recline. And that's how I felt too.

Especially as I had a bowl of apple crumble and two half-scoops of ice cream in my tummy. Especially as I was coming home to do some reading, and then some eating, and then a little writing and pretty soon a small bit of computering (I'll later put up a piece of the bookie I'm working on in Illustrator, which is a little children's book for my god-daughter, and it makes me happy to work on it).

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I needed to change the way I think. What I think about, how my thoughts circulate. Mainly, I decided that I needed to feel more positive, to see things in a yellow-tinged hue, and that I should decide to be in control of my own thoughts. What a strange idea-- that by changing how I perceive, I might change where I see life heading. It made me feel lighter to realize that, perhaps as I've emptied a few rocks from my backpack.

And so, thanks to lh for providing me with apple crisp and a friend to walk through a rare wind with, and thanks to everyone else too.