I Like #1

My friend Lee Anna does weekly I Like posts which she publishes on Thursdays but adds stuff to all week.  One of my goals for 2017 is to be more positive and I think I like posts would be a good way to help do it.  I'll be back with more quilts on other days, but here's a summary of things that have been positives for me lately.

1. I like my family!  Coming off the chaos of the holidays into the very busy but much less bright flavor of January I'm reminded how lucky I am to have a family I'm so close to!  Hooray!

2.  I like blooming plants!  I don't do well with outside plants, but I love houseplants, and most of my prettiest flowers seem to come in the winter.  Right now I have a fun Christmas cactus and bromeliad blooming in my studio!

3. I like Anatomy Lab (I had a picture but this doesn't seem like the place....) !  I'm a pharmacologist and cell biologist by training, not an anatomist, but I've gotten more involved in anatomy teaching in the past year and it's so fun to work hands on with students and learn something new.

4A. I like stickers.  In common with my sense of style (which heavily emphasizes glitter and pink), my great enjoyment of stickers reminds that in many ways there is a first grader still inside me trying to escape.  My lab members will tell you there's a whole folder of fun stickers in my office and any time an experiment goes well, a sticker goes in the lab notebook.  Recently I've started jogging again with my sister, and she sent me a lovely pack of Charlie Brown stickers to put up each day that I jog.  Such a great motivator for me!

4B. I like....not jogging, but the feeling I get afterwards and the playlists I play while jogging.  The playlist I usually jog to is one I made a couple of years back and is pretty eclectic.  I pretty  much included anything I enjoyed that was peppy.  It's about five times longer than my runs, so I don't get repeats very often.  Yesterday I had, among other songs, the Fraggle Rock theme song, Regulate by Warren G, 409 by the Beach Boys, Telephone by Lady Gaga, Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under by Shania Twain, and the Disney Color Song.

5. I like singing!  Our church choir is small but mighty and I love traditional choral music.  I don't have a very good ear, but I can read music after many years of playing the piano.  I've been the only alto in our choir for many years, and over time I've gotten better at finding those notes in the middle of chords and I've come to appreciate the harmony that comes from choral music.

6.  I like quilting!  I know, I know- seems kind of a duh thing, but I really enjoy the quilting part of quilting.  It's especially fun when, like now, I'm quilting something through only a single layer of fabric (rather than the many piled fused layers my work sometimes has) and when my threads aren't breaking and a good playlist is on (not the jogging one).  Here's a quick look at what I've been quilting lately; much more on it later of course.  It's only shiny because I'd just sprayed it with water to start getting rid of the blue marking pen.

I hope you all have a week filled with some things you like, and many thanks to LeeAnna for suggesting this idea to me.