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I'm your host, Danny Lavery.

And with me in the studio this week is Cindy Spiegel, the author of the book, MicroJoy's,

Finding Hope, Especially When Life is Not Okay.

And she is also the founder of Dear Grown As Women, a Social Community for Women 35 and Older.

Cindy, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

I'm so excited to be here, too, for two reasons.

One is before we started recording, we both discovered that we, not in time, but in location,

were briefly neighbors in the same sort of moonstruck adjacent neighborhood.

And also because I'm recording from home today.

And if I seem extra wise, balanced, nurturing, peaceful, it's because there's three dogs in my apartment right now.

So I'm speaking to you with all the authority and the wisdom of somebody who has three dogs,

even though one of them is just on loan from a friend.

I mean, it sounds very much like you know what you're talking about.

I won't lie.

There's this energy and it feels like you know stuff.

It feels like, you remember how when you're a young kid and you're acutely alive to promotion, like, if you're about to become like five and a half or you're about to become a first grader and you're just like you'll tell everyone you meet. I feel like the last couple weeks, I've just been buttonholing strangers on the street and said, you know, there's three dogs in my house right now. Three dogs. Three dogs. This many. This many. Like, I've been reintroduced to the importance of holding up your fingers and saying this many. And hoping you get three up and not like two. Yeah, no, I do have to think about it. It takes a second. But it's so good. And like every time I walk past the bed, if they're all asleep in a row, I'll just say, there's three dogs right there. It's like I'm on Sesame Street all day.

Oh, you know what that is? That's a microjoy. That's what you're experiencing.

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