1.) Devouring Kate Atkinson's "Case Histories" during my commutes. It's been very satisfying. For the last two hours of my workday, I am antsy with the anticipation of getting back into my car and unspooling the thread of the story a bit more.
2.) Picking a new recipe to try this weekend...something hearty and satisfying to combat the dark and snow that have swirled in this week.
3.) Perhaps an hour to myself to sit and knit and watch something Elizabethan on television.
4.) Hugging my daughter's warm, sturdy, fleece jammie-clad body.
5.) Using a coupon to order some replacement stock for my shelf of special scented candles.

I try to write down a lot of my favorite quotes, and they are stuck on little Post-Its around my cube. But it’s surprisingly difficult to come up with one single favorite, something emblematic.
I think the guy who gives the best quotes is Douglas Adams, especially, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
I also like “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move” and “He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
I’m a Neil Gaiman fan, too. “Honestly if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say, ‘what kind of tea?’” This kind of sums up my feelings about my job most days, as does my favorite Hamlet quote, “I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth.”
And sometimes when by boss asks me for something, the only retort that comes to mind is said in a Scottish brogue, frantically: “I cannot change the laws of physics! I need thirty minutes.” Thank you, Scotty from “Star Trek.”
So clearly it’s a difficult choice. But the one quote that has been written in almost all of my journals and has followed me since high school is from my old friend e.e. cummings, who said, “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

Although, in moments of extreme duress, a little bit of my grandmother comes out, when I tell someone something would “gag a maggot off a gut wagon” or is “useless as tits on a boar hog.” I don’t understand the second one very well, not having a good grasp on swine anatomy, but the first one is about as clear as it gets, for any purpose.

Reversible tarot card

In the Tarot, when you learn to assess your Hidden Factor and Teacher cards through numerology, if you are a 19-10-1, your biggest life lesson is to consciously trust that life brings you the experiences you need to achieve your purpose. If you don't, you tend to drift through life, never challenged to use the abundant talents that have been given to you.
I am a 19-10-1 and now, I don't believe in mistakes. I believe that every decision I have made, for better or worse, has led me to become the person I am today. There are people I have wronged, and things I have done badly that I wish I could have done better, but I do not believe in mistakes.
I believe in lessons, and progressions, and getting the opportunity to do and redo until you have learned what you need to learn.