Category: Nebulous Items

  • The Next Ten Days: The Happiness Project Turns 51

    The Next Ten Days: The Happiness Project Turns 51

    Actually, we’re up somewhere near day 53, but I’m not very good at getting my blogging act together. Some days, I really regret having that ridiculous inner drive to actually finish what I’ve started- even if that something is to find something legitimately happy for 100 freaking days. 100 days of happiness when you’ve just…

  • Stock Taking (Again): Notes on Preparing to Leave (Again)

    Stock Taking (Again): Notes on Preparing to Leave (Again)

    How many Ikea POÄNG chairs have I bought (and then sold or left behind) in my decades of careless geographic instability? How many sets of kitchen odds and ends, how many cups and bowls and sets of cutlery? How many bookshelves (and their contents), kitchen tables, armoires (and their sartorial contents) and beds? All of them,…

  • Feed Me, Leicester: Eating Everything Before We Go, the Kayal Edition

    Feed Me, Leicester: Eating Everything Before We Go, the Kayal Edition

    One of the lesser-known perks of having an overtly personal blog that occasionally masquerades as something useful is that you sometimes get some rather unexpected offers out of left field. Like last week, after I finished up my rather haphazard month of attempting happiness, I randomly got an email from the guys at Momondo, a travel…

  • Notes on a Thwackless Day and Moving to Vietnam

    I am, today, sans Thwack. Just me. For the whole day. For, like, the first time ever. Or rather, for the first time since he rather impatiently forced his way out of me three months ago and proceeded to take over our household and our time and our energy like a chuckling, puking, wriggling, thwacking, cuddly…

  • And Now For Something Completely Different: The Happiness Project Roundup

    And Now For Something Completely Different: The Happiness Project Roundup

    It’s been about ten days since I last told you all about the small, daily details that made me happy. The Happiness Project is still going strong, albeit significantly less long-windedly. It’s all happening on Instagram so feel free to stalk me there, should the suspense of waiting ten days for an update here prove too…

  • Day 30: The Happiness Project

    Day 30: The Happiness Project

      Holy crap, we’ve made it to Day 30 somehow. Since the past month has essentially been a blur, I will assume I didn’t space out and skip whole days and/or weeks entirely. A lot has changed in this time, internally if not externally. It has been a curious experiment that threatened to derail a…

  • Day 29: The Happiness Project

    Day 29: The Happiness Project

    Yesterday (that would be Day 29, as noted above) we drove en famille to Newark, about an hour away. We belong to a granola crunchy car share group in Leicester and so every so often happen to have a car at hand. This weekend, we had a slightly ridiculous 8-seater minivan at our disposal (the…

  • Day 28: The Happiness Project

    Day 28: The Happiness Project

      The 30 day aspect of this whole happiness thing is nearly done. I won’t subject you to the whole 100 days that the original challenge called for. Theirs was just photos, anyway. I was the masochist who decided to turn it into a blog post fest. I started this just as my parents were…

  • Day 27: The Happiness Project

    Day 27: The Happiness Project

      I hate dealing with dental crap. All those nerves and bones and grinding noises. I try to avoid dentists if possible (outside of begrudgingly accepted checkups and whatnot) and luckily, aside from my anarchic wisdoms, have had nice, sturdy teeth to allow me to be so evasive. However,  some time around Monday or Tuesday,…

  • Day 26: The Happiness Project

    Day 26: The Happiness Project

      As you may have noted over the past few months of posts, I’ve been wrestling with my newfound status of stay at home mother. I thought I’d be better at it. Not the Thwack wrangling itself, no- he’s good fun to be with most of the time-but rather the lack of intellectual stimulation. The…

  • Day 25: The Happiness Project

    Day 25: The Happiness Project

      It has been a long winter. I mean, it’s mid-May and my mid-weight coat is still hanging on the hook on the back of the kitchen door. I think my inner rhythms had been tricked by a decade in warmer climes, where T-shirts are acceptable clothing starting sometimes as early as March. In Leicester,…

  • Day 24: The Happiness Project

    Day 24: The Happiness Project

      This is getting tricky, y’all. Not the happiness part of the project, as that’s going better than expected, but rather the photography part. I didn’t take any photos yesterday. None. Which makes Day 24 rather tricky to pull off. And really, Day 24 had a lot of surprisingly cathartic moments, which have left me…