Morning on the Porch

Right now I’m sitting on my back porch drinking a cup of coffee and listening to the tree’s branches that surround our back yard wave in the breeze. Brian is sitting quietly next to me reading a new book he got for his birthday on photography and holding the rim of a cup of coffee up against his forehead as he rests his elbow on the armrest of his chair. It looks uncomfortable to me, but he must not think so. Every now and then a cool breeze will come through and all of the leaves will swish louder than the other moments, making me look up from the keyboard to watch them. They always look this same, so I don’t know what really makes me look up besides the startling sound. The coffee I’m drinking is really, really good this morning. Brian woke up before me and made it, and the smell of it woke me up and gave me the motivation I needed to get out of bed. I stood up, went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and walked out into our kitchen and living room to find that Brian was missing. I took a few more steps towards the chair where he normally sits in the morning and saw him out of the corner of my eye on the back porch. Seeing him in a different setting doing something by himself that he found enjoyable and relaxing made me so happy. I almost didn’t want to intrude on his time, but when I stepped out to say good morning the way he smiled at me was so loving. He looked genuinely happy to see me awake, so I decided it was ok for me to get some coffee and come outside too with my laptop and write. The cooler weather today must have drawn him out. Weather.com is telling me that is 82 degrees right now, which feels like a cold front after the terribly hot week we had. If I didn’t have to study for a test today I would take Brian out into the world and ride bikes or play Frisbee golf. Maybe I’ll do that anyway.

Last night we was Brian’s birthday party, and we had lots of fun. The house quickly filled up with family and later filled even more up with friends. We ate hamburgers and hot dogs, pasta salad, deviled eggs, rice krispy treats, blackberry cobbler, cheesecake, baked beans, ice cream, chips, southwestern corn dip (which was really good), and more that I’m forgetting for sure. We were definitely prepared to feed an army after our moms brought in all the side dishes and extra desserts. Toni asked me relatively quickly if I had any Disney movies, and thank God we had Wall-E or I don’t know what we would have done. For someone who loves Disney movies so much I certainly don’t have very many of them. I’ll have to make a note to start collecting them for situations like this.

Speaking of notes, I’ve recently discovered this amazing website called evernote.com. It is amazing. I LOVE to make lists, and this is basically a tool that you can use to keep lots of lists organized for yourself. You can also install this thing on Firefox or Safari where you can click on a web page at any time, and it will turn that page into a note and add it to your Evernote box. I do that a lot with recipes. I will click on a recipe to save it to my evernotes, and label it recipe or dessert or whatever, and then when I want for something to make I can look at all the recipes that have looked good to me on the internet to decide what to make, instead of going online searching through thousands of recipes to find something that looks good. All the things that have looked good to me are already in one spot. This works for me because I read food blogs a lot, so every day I’m looking at recipes and saving ones that look good. When I started my Evernote, I started with 9 Lists that are useful to keep updated from an article Brian sent me from Lifehack.org. For someone who likes to keep lists, they are really great ones to start with. I highly recommend you all start an Evernote account and get these 9 lists started.

Now I guess I’m off to study for my test I have tomorrow. At least the day had a very relaxing start.