Sunday, March 27, 2011

Today's fortune: March 27, 2011 - PHOTO ESSAY

Today's fortune: Your path may be difficult, but will be rewarding.

As I've done a couple times here at My Daily Fortune, today I bring you a photo-heavy post to illustrate how the day's fortune affected my actions.

And really, I was working toward fulfilling two fortunes today. If you remember, yesterday's fortune told me my creative side would shine forth with exceptional ideas tomorrow (which, as it turns out, was today).

Let's work backwards here and tackle today's fortune first. The difficult path I chose first thing this morning was to clean. And not just clean any old portion of our house, but to clean out the room where the little puppy Jamie saved from the streets several weeks back had been residing before we found him a good home.


Since we found little Barney in the coldest part of winter, we were unable to keep him in our backyard when we were both at work, and we didn't want him running loose in the main part of our house with our cats. So we isolated him to our tiny, nearly empty spare bedroom.

Barney is a good pup, but he tore that room to shreds. He gnawed on (and destroyed) a GameCube, scratched all the way through the paint on the lower part of the door, peed in several places and generally created havoc.

Jamie and I had been ignoring the room like a drunken uncle at a Christmas party, hoping the room would clean itself, I guess. But this morning, as Jamie was sleeping in (who can blame her? She normally wakes up at 5 a.m.), I crept out of bed, grabbed a couple trash bags and cleaned the room.

Every single thing in the room went into the trash bags - even some luggage and clothes in the room's tiny closet. I vacuumed - twice - and filled up our vacuum's chamber - twice - with dog hair and filth. The room still smells bad, but at least it's empty now, and a good shampooing of the carpet should finish the job. Or, hell, we may just tear the carpet out and see what the wood looks like underneath.

I also took another difficult path today, this one not difficult physically but emotionally.

I don't have a lot of money, but I am rich in two areas: the love I share with my wife, and the vast library of books I've built during my 31 years on this planet.

Pictured: a very small portion of my collection.
Not only do I love to read, I also have a very personal and unreasonable attachment to my books. I love being surrounded by them. I love the smell of them. I love discovering classics at used book stores and adding new-to-me or little-known authors to my collection.

My library is the only thing I'd care about passing down to children.

And as you can imagine, getting rid of books is extremely difficult for me.

But on certain occasions, I've done it. Books are very very heavy, and every time we moved in the past, I've reduced my collection by weeding out books that a.) I'll never read, or b.) I've already read and have no emotional attachment to.

In previous years, Jamie hasn't shared my appreciation for compiling a library. In fact, she's the one who has motivated me to cut back. At the time I resented her for it, but I'm glad now. My collection is smaller, but it's more streamlined, and every single book has a story behind it. Now that we have a house, I've slowly allowed my collection to expand, to fill and overfill the shelves in our home library, and Jamie, who has grown fonder of books over the years, has not discouraged me.

But my workplace is hosting a used book sale next month, and they're asking for donations. Since I'll probably be purchasing quite a few books at the sale, I decided to clear shelf space by donating some of mine.

They will be missed.

Jamie and I also got our creative juices flowing to fulfill yesterday's fortune by building a birdhouse. The do-it-yourself kit, which is intended for ages 6 and up, has been sitting in the box for over a year, but the kit promised that it would increase our "creativity, cognitive thinking, motor skills and self esteem."

We had a blast. Putting the house together was the easy part; painting it was where we flexed our creative muscles. Instead of making a simple birdhouse, we created the My Daily Fortune Bird Mansion.


We painted a fortune cookie with an aviary-themed fortune on the west side:


And on the east side, we painted the fortune's lucky numbers:

Jamie's birthday is 10/17, mine is 9/15, and we were married on 9/20/2003

The back of the house was bedazzled with a fortune, too:

"Home is where you make your nest."

And we even painted a fortune on the underside:


Okay, so it sort of looks like a couple six-year-olds, rather than thirtysomethings, painted it. But you gotta admit, this pad has some curb appeal. I'd venture to say is is the greatest fortune cookie-themed, hand-painted birdhouse ever made.

The My Daily Fortune Bird Mansion will be given a place of honor on our back porch.

9 comments: