Earlier this year, I created a list of 19 things I wanted to do in 2019. As of mid-June, I’ve scrapped one and completed about three of them, so I guess I should probably get on that. Here’s a recap of what I’ve done so far.

Have you ever heard of orange wines?

Durham has an amazing little wine bar downtown called Bar Brunello. The owner, Esteban, is the real deal, having received a “Rising Star Sommelier Award” from the New York-based culinary magazine StarChefs and having trained with the International Sommelier Guild. It was here that Nick and I first discovered – and ultimately fell in love with – orange wines.

Hear me out.

It starts out as a tiny scratch in your throat when you swallow. You tell yourself it’s just your imagination but before you know it, your entire throat is engulfed in a fiery pain that makes you want to rip it out and stomp on it. Or, you know, sip something warm and soothing.

This was me last week. After several days of dealing with a nasty sore throat, I finally made an appointment to see my doctor. I had tried gargling salt water, sucking Burt’s Bees lozenges, and drinking warm tea with honey, but none of it worked. In desperation for relief while I awaited my appointment, I turned to my Facebook friends to ask them for remedies that I hadn’t tried yet. They swiftly came to my rescue with all kinds of remedies they use to treat their own sore throats. My friends are awesome and their remedies reminded me of two books/articles that I’ve read recently that have been on my mind:

Back in February, a water main broke on our street and somehow flooded several rooms in our house. It destroyed the laminate flooring that came with the house, which meant we had to dry out most of the floors for several days and then replace the flooring. Instead of dwelling on this awful luck, I decided to look on the bright side, the silver lining if you will. I focused on the fact that we were finally getting new flooring – something we had talked about for years but could never commitment to – and we found out there was some mold growing in our crawl space that we were able to take care of before it made anyone sick.

Now, once again, I’m faced with a situation in which I can choose to dwell on my misfortune or try to find that silver lining in things: on Friday (the start of Memorial Day Weekend) I was in a car accident that has likely left my car totaled. Unfortunately, I was at fault and I know it, though I will only personally accept about 90% of the blame because if the construction worker hadn’t parked his car on the curb where it didn’t belong, none of this would have happened.

As Memorial Day came and went, so did the two-year anniversary of my heart attack.

Two summers ago, I had just returned to work from a brief maternity leave and was looking forward to a long weekend of baby snuggles and a nice family picnic. However, instead of spending that time on a blanket in the warm sunshine with my boys, I spent it in a cold hospital room in the cardiac ICU recovering from a spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD). It was truly one of the most scary things to ever happen to me. Because I didn’t get that picnic two summers ago, I decided that a do-over was just want I needed to celebrate my first year of survivorship. I had planned to have another picnic this year to start a new tradition, but unfortunately, Sebastian came down with a fever so we’re having to postpone it for another time.