An absolutely stunning day. The kind of day that, if I was religious, I’d say God made. But I don’t think she did. I think it was simply a function of the weatherman, my favorite dude, Dallas Raines. He made it happen; I'm sure of it.

Blue sky, not even a wisp of a cloud, nor hardly a hint of a breeze.

Perfect bicycle weather.

I'm a big fan of Winnie the Pooh. I freely admit it. In fact, I'm proud of it. The genius of A.A. Milne was that he could take the simplest philosophy, the simplest ideal of life and make it profound.

"Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them."

"If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear."

"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.

"Think it over, think it under."

Oh, and "Bother."

Bother to celebrate Pooh and Piglet and something today.

I watched the Troubadours documentary tonight, and it made me remember how much I absolutely loved Carole King when I was starting to appreciate music.

Longer post tomorrow, but for tonight, I feel the earth move.

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I wonder sometimes if we weren’t happier before we knew everything that was going on in the world at any given moment in time. Between 24-hour news and the Internet, we are bombarded constantly. Maybe it’s just me and the sites I used to visit, but so much of it seems to be mad, or bad, or snarky.

Sometimes I find myself going to Entertainment Weekly just to get some mindless celebrity breakup or crack-up news, or surfing YouTube for some puppy romping or kitten terrorizing-a-shoebox videos to get some relief.

There are good things out there, wonderful things to celebrate. I know this because I took a look at my own life, and found a number of somethings to celebrate.

Somethings that bring me joy, make me smile, and make each day a better day.

I suspect that everyone has something to celebrate. Maybe it’s small, like a hot cup of coffee or a banana that’s perfectly ripe. Not too hard, not too mealy. Perhaps it’s getting snail mail – so old-fashioned and quaint – a “thinking of you” card. Or receiving an accolade regarding work.

My somethings are different every day but often include my dog, my husband making me laugh at something stupid, or an email from my son just to say “hi, mom. love you!” A text from my sister.

I’m not a religious person but I do believe each of us has great purpose, that we can rise above the everyday nastiness that is sometimes too easy to succumb to, and live our lives out loud. Make our voices heard, even silently. It means celebrating something.

A good friend’s voice, a piece of greasy pizza, music, an un-put-downable-book, the quiet, a roaring fire, a fun drive, poetry, television, Chicago, Pedigree dog food commercials, slippers. Every day, something happens that is joyful. What happened today that you’re celebrating? When you give it a name, you make it real, and when you make it real, positivity happens.

That’s why I’m writing, and why I’ve chosen to live it out loud and celebrate something, anything, everything, finding at least one thing every day that makes me smile.

That’s what it means to live it out loud. To spread our arms and dance.

We adopted Maguire on February 17, 1997. He was a smelly little bag of fur, the cutest thing we’d ever seen, eight weeks old and in a cage at the Agoura Animal Shelter. He had two full-size roommates but it didn’t seem to bother him. He slept on his back, four short legs in the air, completely confident that he wouldn’t be attacked.

Kevin found him on a Saturday morning. He and Justin had gone to the shelter without me. I have a hard time going to shelters; I want to bring all the dogs home. The boys had been going for weeks, searching for “our” dog. I had entertained the idea that we would get a female, perhaps three years old or so. Then Kevin came home and announced that he had found the one. And “he” was a puppy. We went back that afternoon so I could meet him, and the little guy came bounding out from the back of the cage, bouncing as puppies do, and proceeded to bark at us, yip really, three times. So ferocious. And so incredibly adorable that I was smitten.

Because he had been turned in the day before and the shelter had a policy of holding the dogs for at least three-days before adopting them out, we had to wait until Monday morning before we could take him home. Kevin and I were there at 7 am on that Monday in February. By 8 am, we were home with our stinky boy.

We named him Maguire because on the way home from the shelter he thrust his head into the center console of the car and pulled out a dollar bill. We had just seen Jerry Maguire. “Show me the money.” It seemed to fit.

We bathed him, trained him, fell head over heels in love, and grew as a family.

He was supposed to be a medium dog. He grew to be 85 pounds and every pound is pure joy. We still have no idea what his mix is but we’ve settled on Golden Retriever, Australian Shepherd, and a few other ingredients thrown in for flavor.

He’s 14 now, an old man by big-dog standards. But he’s healthy and happy. He doesn’t run anymore, can no longer jump on the bed like he did for years to cuddle with me in the morning. But he loves his nightly walks; still chews on his toys. A current favorite, called Rope, is a tennis ball wrapped in thick string. He can’t penetrate it and it is an ongoing challenge. He still barks in threes, though his bark is now a deep baritone.

When he was little, he had a bit of white on his face, but his fur was mostly black. Then he went through what we called his surfer-puppy phase, when he became blonde. Now he’s back to mostly black fur, with an all white face. Even his eyelashes are white.

Our boy is old.

We’ve developed a true appreciation and love for older dogs, for their mannerisms, for their defiance. They’re so sure of themselves, so confident in who they are. That’s our boy.

Maguire sleeps most days, and his walks are shorter than they used to be. He’s almost completely deaf so he rarely goes into the backyard for longer than a short tour of the property, which isn’t very big. He goes into the bedroom now when it’s dark and barks at nothing. He loves to huff and puff, standing at the window in the kitchen, staring out at the world going by, and assert his big-dog status when another dog dares to walk within eyesight.

He dreams more now than he used to, his front and back feet both furiously galloping to somewhere. Occasionally he has nightmares and those are scary. He moans and cries in his sleep; sometimes he pees. It breaks my heart.

Each morning he gets up between 6:30 and 7, shakes his fur into place and walks out, stiffly, onto the hard wood floor of the living room. His nails announce that he’s ready to go out. Jazz puppy, we call it. Chhhh ch-ch-chhhh ch-ch-chhhh  ch-ch-chhhh.

He eats his cookies, takes his glucosamine and chondroitin, and then settles down for the first of his many naps.

We pet him, kiss his nose, rub on him, and love him.

He has at least 20 names. Maguire, Magu, Maguski, Honey Bear, Bear, Boo, Boo Boo, Puppy Feet, Sparky, Sparklet, Twinkle Toes and more. He’s always been our puppy. We recently dubbed him our vintage puppy.

He may be old, but he’s still got it going on. And we celebrate him every minute of every day.

One of my guilty pleasures is 70s music. Not disco; never disco. But the softer side of rock. The kind of music that Time Life used to put on CDs and sell to suckers like me. There's something about listening to America, Jim Croce, Carly Simon and others that reminds me of growing up. Once I discovered real music, like Fleetwood Mac, Heart's Dreamboat Annie, Peter Frampton and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, I got over anything that resembled Bread or the Bee Gees. 

Except that I didn't. Not really. Every once in a while, I still want to hear the Little River Band and Ambrosia. I think it's nostalgia. 

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It'll make you cringe a little but if you're in your 40s or 50s, I bet you know all the words.

Apologies for the Afternoon Delight and the Carpenters. Even nostalgia can't make either any better. 

As a writer, I am naturally enamored with words, all of them. The ones I know and even the ones I don’t. One word can alter the course of a conversation, even change the course of a relationship. The right word can bring both smiles and tears, sometimes simultaneously. The wrong word can bring anger, fear and loathing.

I use words to make my living. Each day I stare at numerous blank Word documents, the little angry cursor blinking at me incessantly, waiting for me to put a word, a string of words, a sentence of words that become a paragraph that become an entire article or story, down and to hit save. Years ago we didn’t need to worry about that; today we have to save our words.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the recognized authority on all things word-related, there are some 600,000 words in the English language though not all are in current use. Its second edition contains entries for 171,476 words that we use every day and 47,156 words that have become obsolete. There are also 9,500 derivative words, something formed from something else. Electricity from electric. There are also slang words. When you total them all up, there are over 250,000 words in use every day.

Shakespeare, one of the premier wordsmiths ever, used some 884, 647 words in his plays and sonnets, but his vocabulary was between 18,000 and 25,000. The average 16 year old has a vocabulary of 10,000 to 12,000 words. A college graduate uses 60,000 active words and 75,000 passive ones.

Half of the words we use are nouns, a quarter are adjectives and a seventh are verbs. The rest are exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes and more.

As a writer, I hope I use all parts of all words. I yell! I write and I read. I have books on a shelf. I have walked through a bookstore. I’m in love.

See what I did there? I used an exclamation, a conjunction, a preposition, and a suffix. I did not use more. Well, maybe I just did.

Words can wound or bring joy, they can dance or fall flat. They can describe a murderous plot with detail (in the corner of the dark room, a sliver of light oozed through the crack in the blinds, illuminating a tiny man; the shadow of an ax glowed eerily on the white wall), or declare undying love (I’ve been waiting for you all my life and suddenly, you walked in, ordered a beer and winked at me. And I was powerless to stop my heart).

In my arsenal of 60,000 active words I like ones like archaic, discombobulated, nebulous, nefarious, puppy. Is there a better word than puppy? Maybe puddle.

And of course one of my favorites from when I was in 5^th grade and we had a contest to see who could make the most words from another word. The word was antidisestablishmentarianism. To this day I’m not sure what it means. But I know I won the contest.

That’s the power of words.

Oh, and there are 523 fabulous words in this blog post. 

Red. Preferably a syrah, preferably from the 2007 harvest, preferably from Zaca Mesa. Heavy, deep, walk-through-it, chew-on-it, go-to-bed-with-it-and-sigh syrah.

We went wine tasting tonight. Can you tell?

I no longer have a regular job with regular hours. I pretty much work most of the time and I’m OK with that because my commute is short – upstairs to my loft office – and I go to work in sweats and a sweatshirt most days. Shorts and a tee in the summer. I start work by 8 am and can often be found at my keyboard long after 10 pm. But I love my job; I’m privileged to make a living putting words together in pleasant sentences.

But even without Monday thru Friday, 9 – 5, there’s still something about Wednesday that inspires joy. By the time the phone stops ringing and the emails stop flowing, somewhere in early evening, a precedent is set. The week is more than half over. I guess old habits die-hard.

Wednesday is a great day and I love it. I wake up motivated and tend to be very productive. I finished a catalog, wrote an article, and five radio spots today alone. Around 9 pm I’ll settle onto the couch with my laptop to watch a little TV and relax, and begin looking forward to the rest of the week.

Tomorrow is Thursday and wine tasting. Friday is the end of the week, even for people like me who don’t have set hours. And the weekend is all about cooking and a good bottle of wine, maybe a movie and yes, more work.

But today is about Wednesdaying. Enjoying the middle and celebrating the fact that, by the end of this day, the day with the most letters in its name, I’m much closer to the weekend than I am farther away.

When I was young, growing up in New England, Wednesday was Prince Spaghetti Day. I remember the commercials, with a little boy running through the streets of Boston’s North End, his mother calling from a brick apartment building: “Anthony! Anthony!” We always had spaghetti on Wednesdays, either with meatballs or a Bolognese sauce. The parmesan cheese came from a green can with Kraft on the label.

Tonight we’re having fajitas. But in my heart it’s still Prince Spaghetti Day and I’m craving some good old-fashioned pasta.

Maybe this weekend I’ll make sauce. 

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The warm sun inside the cool air. The clouds dotting the blue sky. The weather report that says rain is coming, which means the prospect of a wet weekend.

A conversation with one friend and the reconnection with another.

A lovely glass or two of 2007 Niner Wine Estates Cabernet Franc, one of the best wines we’ve had in a while. Smoky, heavy, with a wet earth and roasted pepper nose and a taste that’s smooth and silky.

The comforting, thick smell of my dog’s fur. His dreaming, dancing feet on the hard wood floors.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark” on USA and a young Harrison Ford.

A hot shower.

The touch of my husband’s hand as he gently moves me aside, reaching for his toothbrush.

The night and my big, California King bed with clean sheets and a fluffy comforter.

Living it out loud.  

What are you celebrating?