I’ve been tagged! Happy 101

Lisa Kate of Sparkle Is My Crack! tagged me for the Happy 101 meme that’s been going around: list 10 things that make you happy, and tag 10 blogs.

Happiness Is...

These things make me happy, sometimes unreasonably so:

1. My boy-cat, a smoke tabby, Glamour Puss. He's very affectionate and mellow, and follows me every morning and "supervises" as I put on my makeup. I'm taking him to the vet tomorrow evening - he's being boarded there overnight, no food or water, because the next morning he's having a tooth extracted before it abcesses. I'm worried - he had some kind of a fit about a month ago (not repeated), and he's just over ten years old. (All my cats make me happy; and I know I'm not supposed to have favorites; but...I do.)
2. Lindt Intense Pear chocolate bars - dark chocolate with slivers of almond and pear. Marvelous!! They're not easy to find, but they're rich enough and satisfying enough that when I do find them, I can easily make one bar last a week. Yep, this chocolate is -=that=- good.
3. Rereading a favorite book. It's like meeting an old friend after a long absence - even the "brain fluff" humorous science fiction that came out in such profusion in the 1980s.
4. Rereading a book and finding references and threads that I didn't find the first time through! I love this. I read a lot of anthropological and sociological science fiction with very fully-fleshed out worlds, so the worlds are pretty dense...but the books can be enjoyed for the surface story, and then enjoyed again when you catch more of the subreferences. This is a really screwball analogy, but some folks will get it: remember watching the Warner Brothers cartoons when you were 4-8 years old and laughing at the character's silly antics and bizarre stories...and then laughing at the subreferences ("Dark horse? Mayor?!?") when you caught them again 5 or 10 years later? You enjoyed the cartoons both times, on different levels. I really love books that do this same thing. (Quick digression: Robin Williams called Aladdin "a Warner Brothers cartoon in Disney drag". Which goes quite a way toward explaining why I enjoyed this whereas Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, and most of Disney's recent offerings were nice enough, but didn't hold up to repeat viewings.)
5. The smell of the air right after a heavy rainfall. There's that new-washed smell, and the air has been scrubbed clean, and there's just the slightest tang of ozone.
6. That "null zone" of absolute and total quiet during a snowfall. It's as if the whole world's volume was muted, just for a few minutes, and not a sound is heard - there's not even any wind. I love just stopping whatever I'm doing and listening to the silence.
7. The scent of chili cooking in the crock pot: kidney beans, black beans, garbanzo beans, chili beans, two jars of salsa, and a torn-up rotisserie chicken (added at the halfway mark, because it doesn't need to cook the full 6-8 hours, just long enough to fully absorb the flavors of the chili and the spices.) Eating it is good, too - the rotisserie chicken really adds texture and some protein. But when it's slow-cooked, the aroma slowly fills the entire house. Wonderful stuff...
8. Coloring. Yes, coloring - preferably with markers. It relaxes me, puts my brain into a "downtime" state and helps me meditate. I love Altair Designs, and years ago I bought used copies on Ebay and then scanned the designs in so that I could color the designs whenever I wanted but not "lose" the templates. (The Images books by Robert Burroughs are not the same at all. Similar...but not the same.) I like some mandala design books, but really - the Altair Designs are fantastic. I've since looked for Islamic-pattern design books since the original Altair Designs were based on Islamic geometric patterns, but there aren't too many available. Or maybe I just haven't been looking in the right places.
9. Listening to the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack - all four seasons. It's lush, multilayered, and gorgeous...and appeals to more than the typical network view of a science fiction audience (my mother, who Does Not Like Science Fiction, loves the soundtrack.) I actually missed the chance to hear it performed live, in a 3-hour event at the San Diego Comic Con this past summer. I would have loved that!! I'll just have to keep an eye out for any performances anywhere else on the west coast of North America.
10. Emailing or talking with my geeky, zany sci-fi and theater friends, slinging subreferences at twice the speed of thought, seeing "quien es mas meta".

Tag - you're it!!

If you've already been tagged by this and don't want to do it again, let me know and I'll sub in another name. In no particular order...

1. AxSDenied of Painted Princess
2. Chrys of Married 2 Makeup
3. Cucumpear of Cucumpear's Pandemonium of Cosmetics
4. Leanne of Do Not Refreeze
5. Michelle of Ramblings of a Purple M
6. Rae of theNotice
7. Sara of The Makeup Snob
8. Sirvinya of Confessions of a Makeup Addict
9. Starlight of Chantillylacebeauty
10. V of VexInTheCity

Share:

Like this entry? Check these out: