Day 125: Happy Finds

We all have those days when it would have been better to hide under the sheets all day. Nothing goes right. The shirt you want to wear has a stain right in the front where everyone can see, there's no hot water for a shower, you run late the whole day, and then when you get home you start making dinner only to find that half way through you are missing not one but two key ingredients, then a headache starts to set in and so on and so forth. You get the picture. Days like this need a do over. But then a day comes along that is so pleasant and nice that you keep pinching yourself to make sure you are awake and not dreaming. Everywhere you go things just glide together easily and effortlessly. I love those days and today just happened to fall into that category.

It was the first Friday in May today, which means that I get to leave work at two p.m. Beginning my day with that thought in mind is like getting in your car and then finding yourself flying down the highway. No stop lights to wait for, somehow you magically skipped over all of the traffic and now it's just smooth sailing. When the clock struck two I didn't waste any time. I was "on my bicycle", as they say in south Africa (see my post from Day 90).

First on my list was to mail a package (shhh... Don't tell but it was my mom's Mother's Day present!). When I arrived at the mail center there was no line to wait in. Sweet. To be fair, there aren't generally lines at the post office here. At least not like in the U.S. I think the longest I have ever waited was five minutes. Package mailed, I then headed over to the bus stop. It is always hit or miss with making it to the stop right before or right as the bus is arriving. I usually get there just after it stopped and the next one is running behind schedule. I could almost walk to my destination faster. I glanced down the street and, low and behold, there it was rounding the corner a block away. This was my lucky day!

My second stop was one of my favorite stores, Iris Hantverk. They carry beautifully-crafted, handmade items by Swedish artists with a focus on handmade brushes, made by blind people. There are brushes for everything you can imagine. I have a face brush, a body brush and a vegetable brush and many of our friends and family have received gifts from Iris. I love this store. I can always find things to love and covet there. My trip there today was to pick up another bottle of apple, and thyme-scented, dish soap, which we were not sure about when I first bought it but now, after using it for a while, we find it quite lovely. Plus it is made with all natural ingredients and plant extracts. The first time I saw this soap at the store I also saw several other products by the same company, particularly a cinnamon and jasmin scented laundry soap, to be used for hand washing ones nicer linens. Well I did not buy anything during that discovery trip and when I returned to purchase it, they were sold out. The only item left was the dish soap so I grabbed it. The manager did not think that they would continue to sell this companies products. That news was disappointing.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered today that they not only had more of the dish soap, which I thought could be sold out by now, but they had all of this companies products on their shelves again. I was ecstatic. I won't mention that I noticed this AFTER I had been standing right next to the shelves where the products were sitting, while I was trying on a pair of clogs and admiring myself in the mirror. For probably ten minutes. It was when I asked a woman who was looking at the laundry soap if she thought the shoes looked too small that I finally noticed that it was THE laundry soap I had coveted before and which had gone missing.

Some days I go in to Iris and I don't find anything I want to buy and other days everything on the shelves calls out to me. Today was one of those days. I left with some "washi tape", dish and laundry soap and the clogs. I couldn't resist. They were all happy finds. What do you think?

So many fun things I can do with these gorgeous, decorative tapes!

I think they are super cute... even with my blue and white polka-dotted socks. :-)