Stilettos, Stoli & Scribbles ~ Served With A Twist

Good morning and Happy Monday!

It’s going to be a great day, I can feel it.  Or maybe it’s just because I was inside all weekend fighting off some disgusting chest thing and I’m so happy to be “out” that I’m choosing to see it that way.  Potato-tomato. Everything depends on one’s perspective and perception anyway, right?

When I got off the train and stood on the edge of campus this morning, I could almost hear the birds chirping, as if I’d been conked on the head in some Looney Tunes cartoon.

I hadn’t, of course. It’s just that there’s finally been a break in the humidity and it wasn’t yet beastly hot. There are still two weeks before classes start so we’re in the relative calm before the storm, though the groundskeepers are hard at work sprucing the campus

the newly rebuilt flower beds outside the entrance to my office. Will someone please explain to me why they chose to fill it with something that looks like weeds?

for Welcome Week and I was once again struck by just how pretty this place is.  I take it for granted most of the time, but sometimes I do manage to “stop and smell the {flowers}”, both literally and figuratively.

I may have mentioned some days it feels like I work in a park, but I think I just told Instagram)

On my way to get my coffee, armed with my phone lest I be missed, I used its (surprisingly good) camera to vainly attempt to capture the color of the bright blue sky with its thin wisps of white.

I often take pictures of the things that strike me,

most of which I never look at again (and if I do, sometimes make me wonder what the hell I was thinking), let alone show to anyone else, but I sometimes feel compelled to preserve the moment.

Often it’s the architecture of this place that catches my eye. Taking pictures of buildings at weird angles makes me feel artsy.

I really did have Mr. Roger’s Theme Song in my head as I walked back to the office.  Then the tranquil scene was smashed as the next sound I heard was not the melodic chime of the trolley to the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe”, but the *bang clang clang* of the heavy machinery slowly dismantling the building next to the one in which my office is located.

Apparently they couldn’t just blow it up (or “in” as is usually the case) because our building, which still has people in it, is so close. So they’re taking it down brick by brick. (We won’t discuss the mice that were evicted and forced to seek the nearest shelter.)

It’s kind of funny, that on one side of us is a brand new dorm, all bright and shiny, waiting for the onslaught of students to arrive and inhabit it for the first time,

and on the other is a dorm that has seen its last pre-game kegger and its last all-night cram for finals,  literally being pulled apart at the seams

photo courtesy Frank Bailey

(to make way for a new athletic complex. That means that the old one of those will have to come down soon as well.  For as long as I’ve been here, there has never not been construction taking place on this campus). As usual, I digress.

All of this is to say that I still have days when I appreciate my surroundings and know that I’m lucky to get to come to work in a place that looks like this.

Because, as with all things, it could always be worse.

Anything you’re particularly grateful for on this first day of the working week? What’s given you pause and made you smile? Please do share, and have a great rest of the week!

(thanks to K.R. Brorman for the inspiration this morning.)