thank you notes 9/19

i'm thankful to have never really cared for croissants, but to have had the idea that we needed some kind of bread on the side to make the salads a more substantial meal and to have seen croissants and known that d loves croissants, but will rarely buy them because she knows i don't really care for them and because they are fatty and caloric. i'm thankful for the croissants, which i really liked as an accompaniment to salad, and to have realized from that that my issue is not with croissants in and of themselves, but with them as a choice of breakfast pastry, since i always want something sweeter as a choice of breakfast pastry.

i'm thankful that i had a nice long leisurely run yesterday, even if i had an unpleasant exercise hangover after. i'm thankful i started off by planting the mug i bought as a secret thank you gift for my coworker on his desk so that he'll find it this morning when he gets in to the office. i'm thankful that it was sunny and 75, a state which, when i notice it, always makes me think of david berman, both the silver jews song "people" ("it's sunny and 75 / it feels so good / to be alive") and his poem "the charm of 5:30," which begins "it's too nice a day to read a novel set in england." 

i''m thankful that i passed through a park where a creek was being dug, the unearthed mud dark like chocolate cake. i'm thankful that on the bike path, i paused to move some large branches which had fallen during the storms on saturday so that they wouldn't trip up runners or bikers who came after me. i'm thankful that i wore my old nike running shoes instead of my newer adidas ones, both because it was a bit wet out and because maybe they are actually better running shoes even if they are old.

i'm thankful for the double chocolate ghirardelli box brownies that d made for dessert—i'm thankful, at the grocery store, for our pause to parse the varieties, the names of which all had chocolate and some vague abstract modifier ("double" "extra" etc.). i'm thankful that when i was in the bath yesterday, d brought me a new bar of soap because the one i had was just a sliver. i'm thankful for the sensation of gluing a leftover sliver of soap to a new bar. 

i'm thankful for the old joke a character told in red plenty, which is that a question mark is an exclamation point in middle age. i'm thankful for the thing one of the bakers said during bread week of bakeoff about trying to make a temperamental steamed dumpling called dampfnudeln, which is that, because she'd never made them before, no matter what happened, the dampfnudeln she was making would be the best dampfnudeln she'd ever made. i'm thankful to write that in the hope of remembering it the next time i cook something new.