Happy Harvest Blog
Look who I found crossing the path today
I'm sad for all the animals; this weirdly long winter must be so hard on them. The robins are in a high-profile crisis, and I've noticed the dwindling numbers and variety at my feeder, leaving the dauntless corps of constant chickadees and woodpeckers.
MAPLE SAP KOMBUCHA!
I bottled the first batch and it is aMAZing. I'm saying it myself.It first occurred to me when I was reading about syrup reduction and encountered a comment explaining that sometimes a 'mother' can form on top in the bottle of syrup, and this is a distasteful, undesirable thing..... wait, what?Did somebody say 'mother'?
Post hurricane cleanup
IMGP7100H.W. climbed the big snag that fell in the storm, and cut it free. By hand.
Mosquito mayhem
The sound of a mob of insects literally out for your blood is disturbing. Out of nowhere, mosquitoes came to besiege us in the night in numbers we haven’t seen here before. Clouds of them covered the screened windows and speckled the outside of the camper.
Tropical storm Arthur
For all we knew, this was routine wind for Nova Scotia. Only when we went out to “town” that we found the power was off everywhere, trees were hanging on power lines and the roads all over, and the storm was a big enough deal to have a name: Arthur.
Shade and energy
Got our wiring sorted out, too, and am very happy to discover that the solar panel handily charges two laptops, two cordless tool batteries, phones, camera batteries, and more in one sunny afternoon, without a blip on the battery voltage
We are here!
A few days after my 40th birthday we finally arrived at our Nova Scotia property, to stay. Another project is about to be begin. A new list is about to be written.
Darn socks!
There's bad intel out there! 3 out of 4 "tutorials" are wrong. But this lady's got it, and this YouTube video. Pick your sock darning teachers wisely!
Depression
The thing about depression is that when depressed it’s extremely, mortally, difficult to do things. What you are capable of gets smaller, and smaller, and more difficult, until you are barely, with great suffering, managing to do the minimum to survive.
It's all about the list
My list has two sections: eight things I intend to do daily, and eleven things that I want to do 1-3x per week. When I execute one, I get to stick one of my fancy glitter stars over the hopeful little grey placeholder. The satisfaction of doing this is all out of proportion.
One week in:
This little journal reminds me now of the 92 year old woman who dropped a pile of day planners like this on my desk and blithely told me she’d kept a journal every day for her whole life. “Well, not when I was very small”. Each little inch was filled with her tiny handwriting about coffee dates, projects, feelings, moods, successes- everything. An inch can be enough to summarize the main events of a day.
Never was a list so serious
In a spectacular example of the wrong approach, I started the day with cookies, didn’t drink water, and spent nearly a day creating the list of my model Happiness plan. The irony was not lost on me, as I flouted early entries ON the list, like hydrate; wrestled with text in a handwriting font when I could have written it by hand faster; and spent energy on an accessory, at best- creating a list instead of taking actions that were on the list.
Rules, Adages, or Guidelines for Happiness
If a system doesn’t function, change the system. My husband gives me fantastic feedback on whether a system works (like, where things belong). If it works, he puts things back where they “go”, because that’s the easiest, obvious place to put them. If the system doesn’t work, he finds someplace else to drop them that displeases me, and I know my so-clever system isn’t functional and needs to be adapted.
My Happiness Project
Do something every day, and it becomes who you are. Good or bad. Read, get angry, and write daily, and eventually you are a well-read angry writer......Most motivating is imagining the freedom of being able to have an idea and begin it.
Happiness Jar
I love this idea because it has multiple elements of happiness-causing behavior. It creates a tradition, creates a handy year-in-review memorabilia, and amplifies happiness by creating (at least) two chances to recollect the happy event:
That’s so 1985
Dig out the relic calendars from 1991, 2002, or 1985, because those are entirely reusable in 2013. Obviously, the 80’s are back, after all.
Instagram.
I may not make a blog post every day, but at least I Insta.
Bite size.
