Simple things that make me happy

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I’ve been hav­ing a sort of blah week. I don’t know what it is, noth­ing is really wrong in my life. I’m just tired all the time, and wish­ing I wasn’t. I guess.

Anyway, I thought to list some things that make me happy and try to do those.

  1. Having pretty nails.
  2. A warm cozy bed
  3. Snuggling with my cats
  4. Reading a good book
  5. Brainstorming ideas for my novel
  6. Early morn­ing sum­mer walks
  7. Straight hair
  8. Smooth skin
  9. Warm sun­shine
  10. Having a skinny day

I noticed a trend in the list. I need more me time. I like putting in a lit­tle effort to feel good about myself, but I usu­ally have so much to do that I rush around doing that, rather than put on a coat of nail pol­ish or some­thing else that is sim­ple but makes me smile all day.

Then there’s the warm sun­shine thing, and as it snowed the other day, that’s under­stand­able. Plus, I gen­er­ally go to work in the dark, work all day, then leave and its dark. I don’t get to see sun­shine much any­more, warm or otherwise.

I also found it inter­est­ing that noth­ing relat­ing to a com­puter is on there, since I do spend a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of my down time on the com­puter doing basi­cally nothing.

Question to the read­ers: How much time do you allow your­self to have to your­self? Do you sched­ule in blocks of time to work on some­thing that will make you happy? Or, like me, do you spend all your time get­ting all the chores done and only when everything’s fin­ished allow your­self down time, but usu­ally just go to bed instead … or similar?

Silver Lining

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A lady I work with said some­thing that sort of took me by sur­prise the other day. She said that she loves that I always find the good in things.

What lead to this was that we’d been talk­ing about some­thing that even after seven years, I’m still pretty bit­ter about. I won’t go into it here, because it’ll just turn into a long rant about work. The short ver­sion is that I felt back stabbed, and taken advan­tage of because of my age.

In the end, after my rant I took a deep breath and thought about it. If none of that had hap­pened, than I wouldn’t have met the per­son who first men­tioned to me that I should be a librar­ian. He was the one who told me that you need a degree for that.

I dis­missed it because col­lege was scary, and while I hated my job at the time, I thought it’d get better.

It didn’t get bet­ter. It got worse, a lot worse.

This sec­ond thing I’d been rant­ing about was the kick I needed to decided that I wanted out. I didn’t want to play the game any­more. The only real way out I saw, was to go to school to get my degree and to some­day become a librar­ian. I wanted what I saw as a real job.

So, my hus­band and I got mar­ried, I filled out the papers to apply to the local com­mu­nity col­lege (about all I thought I’d be accepted to with­out any SAT scores) and a month later I stepped down to part-time and started sum­mer classes.

I dove in head­first and devoted my life to col­lege for four solid years. I didn’t take sum­mers off, I made sure I had a full semes­ter of courses, and I worked part time, a min­i­mum of 20 hours a week, but usu­ally around 30.

Unfortunately, I fin­ished col­lege a lit­tle over a year ago, and I still have the same job.

That part of the plan hasn’t been as easy as I’d hoped. I did find a part time job in a library, which I love, but it’s not enough to leave the other job. It is enough for us to have bought our first house, and move out of our apartment.

So there we go with the sil­ver lin­ing again, which is funny, since I’ve always con­sid­ered myself a pessimist.

Questions to the Readers: Do you find your­self look­ing at how past events, even bad ones, shape the things in your life?

In the kitchen

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You may have heard on the news that Borders went out of busi­ness. Well, we had one near my work and it sat empty for maybe a month. Now there’s a Books-A_Million in the spot. They look like the same store.

They didn’t even change the car­pet. They moved some shelves around, and you can tell by the clean patches. They have a bet­ter selec­tion of cheaper books, at least.

While wait­ing for my hus­band to get his hair­cut, I browsed around. I saw one book which I almost bought.

It was The Stocked Kitchen. I might still buy it, but on Amazon where it’s 35% off1. I read the intro­duc­tion and some of the begin­ning ‘how-to’ pages in the store.

It seems like a good con­cept. Probably old news to a lot of peo­ple, but not to me.

Basically they have a whole book of recipes, and a gro­cery list of things that if you buy, you can make every­thing in the book. They are things which don’t per­ish eas­ily which is nice.

From my exper­i­ments in cook­ing, I usu­ally pick up an ingre­di­ent for a recipe and then it sits in the pantry until it goes bad and I throw it out. I don’t like doing that.

I’m kind of picky, so I might mod­ify the list, and the recipes to suit us, but I really like the idea enough to try it some­day. I also want to try using up some of those pesky stray ingredients.

I’m not a good cook. I don’t really like cook­ing most of the time. Sometimes I do, just I’m nor­mally tired or have sore feet from work, and the last thing I want to do is come home to fig­ure out what to make.

We’ve been eat­ing out a lot lately.

Two of my friends have this kitchen busi­ness down to a sys­tem. One only buys exactly what she’s going to use. The other tries out new things all the time, but she meal plans so she knows what to buy for what she’s going to make.

We pick up things as the week goes on for some­thing quick to grab and make as the week goes by. We’re in a gro­cery store six days a week, and doing it this way cuts back, some, on waste.

Question to the read­ers: Your thoughts on this method? Do you buy things to use in a recipe then never use again? Or are you able to know what you cook well enough and only buy what you need?

  1. No, that’s not an affil­i­ate link ↩