100 Things – #39 dotted lines

Printed in a cutting grid on the back of wrapping paper. In my perfect world,  all wrapping paper would be printed this way

100 Things #38 Vendors embracing technology

I have a Groupon for a massage.  I call the salon and am on hold for half of forever so hang up, thinking I’ll call later.  Since I had just been trying to get my son in for some blood work and the company does all appointment setting / changing etc. on their website it gave me the idea to see if the salon had such a thing (even though I figured it was a long shot).

Sure enough, I can select my specific date, preferred time, specific massage service and whether I want male or female.  All they didn’t ask was what I’d like to drink and how do I like my coffee / lemon in my water?

In my perfect world, all appointment making would occur this way.  On a related note, in my perfect world, my kids’ school (and indeed everyone everywhere that is ever going to require me to fill out a form of any kind) would have all that paperwork online in pdf form that can be filled out online before printing out.  With 3 kids, school and aftercare/summer camp alone requires the filling out of approximately 40 forms / year.  Most of which is the same information written out 12 different times.  I could happily live without ever picking up a pen.

100 Things: #37

In the “Sometimes it’s the little things” category… the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox browser is making me very happy.  Why?  I usually have anywhere from 6 to 20 tabs open most of which are on some page that I want to do something with / about.  Also, most of which, I don’t get done in a given day.  I used to have an add-on that put a “Save Session” item on one of the menus.  There were a number of problems with this involving BETCHAK errors mostly (that’s “between the chair and keyboard” – i.e. the user or, in this case, me – for you non-acronym peeps).  I can’t tell you how many hundreds of tabs I’ve meant to keep which were lost by way of these errors.

The new version has a default setting for opening the browser with whatever it had when it was last closed.  I don’t have to remember to click anything and my tabs won’t be lost in system crashes etc.

I will probably still not get around to doing whatever I want to do with a lot of the pages on these tabs.  But at least it will be because, at some point, I decided it’s not worth it / important / relevant or whatever rather than because I forgot to click something / clicked something by accident / my system threw a hissy.

It’s possible I should be concerned that this makes the list.  I’m going with the justification that many of those tabs are work-related stuff I want to do something with.  Yeah, that’s it.

100 Things: 33, 34, 35 & 36

33 – Inspired by my new bag of Don Pablo coffee. The smell when you open a brand new bag of really good coffee beans.  The way the smell stays in the kitchen after you grind them.  Pretty sure the actual drinking of coffee (particularly with my hazelnut flavored creamer.  The new kind, with the real cream) has already made this list.  Probably top 5 but I’m too lazy to go look.

34 – Coffee as a sample.  That new bag of coffee?  I bought it because it was one of the samples  @ Costco a couple times and I thought it was really good.  I’d been waiting to buy it till we used up the other 2 (costco-sized) bags we already had.  So the anticipation had been building for some time. But this item is about samples. While they make my boys happy, they generally kind of make me twitch when I’m trying to shop with them (usually in a hurry) and they have to hit all the samples. Then there’s the sales pitch, the arguing over whether it’s good or not.  One refusing to try it the other begging me to buy it (again, Costco-sized.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve done this only to have them decide they now hate it and it’s not fit for human consumption.  Nothing like having a 64 oz of mango jelly in the fridge that no one wants.)

But coffee as a sample?  Yes, please.  But only if they’ve got some 1/2 + 1/2 or real cream(er).  None of that powdered crap.  Kind of counter-productive to the goal of selling more coffee, dontcha think?

35 – A clean kitchen.  (Inspired by the contrast in the state of my kitchen when I arrived there this morning vs. its current state. ) Even though I probably not actually the *furthest* thing from a neat freak, I am far enough down that spectrum that you can’t see it from here.  Nor can you really get there from here, I don’t think.  But one’s outlook on the day and life, even, can certainly be dramatically changed depending on whether the counters are wiped down, dishes washed, put away, etc.  Not to mention the clearing of the high counter where all the paraphernalia and debris that makes up a life (or 5) seems to gather. Not that I’m too keen on doing it (which is why I chose to blow it off last night and lay in bed having a long conversation with a friend, instead) but in the absence of that wand that went missing…

36 – Clean floors.  Sadly, this item was not inspired by observing freshly-cleaned floors in my house this morning.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  And it is only *newly*-cleaned that count here since, with the 2 small, 1 medium and 1 large two-legged boys and 1 medium-sized 4-legged boy clean floors only last about 25 minutes anyway.  Or 6 hours if they are in school / at work / napping in the doggy bed.

In any case, if the floors are clean, the house feels clean (even though that may not necessarily be is almost certainly not the case).  Note to self: get those boys trained in proper vacuuming technique and implement a schedule where they regularly do it.

100 Things: #31 & 32

31 – green lights in my Gmail

32 – Lost friends found and the friendship renewed

This is kind of a two-fer.  I use Gmail on my phone and have it open in my browser all day as I work.  In the contacts list, for anyone who is also on Gmail, there is a little Google Talk icon that is either gray (offline) orange (idle) or green (online).  Now I don’t actually use the talk that much but seeing those green lights and knowing that I can talk to my friends (these are all people I <3 but who are all over the continent / world so I don’t get to see them at all or much, otherwise) makes me happy.  Every single time.  Just knowing that I can talk to them – seeing that green light feels like a virtual equivalent of running into them @ the supermarket or mall or library or something.  So the green light of any of my good friends makes me happy but thanks to the web and Facebook I have gotten back in touch with a number of people who were very dear to me years ago. These are people I had completely lost track of and would definitely never have found again if not for Al Gore (<- it’s a joke, people).  There are 2 such people who have green lights in my list, as above.

Again, we don’t *actually use it* to chat much, but there a whole ‘nother layer of happy in just seeing the green light next to those names because it’s a reminder of friends found and the opportunity to write the sequel to a friendship from a different era of our lives.

100 things: #30

Eavesdropping on my kids’ conversations while driving. It is endlessly entertaining to listen in on the conversations these boys come up with while we’re driving here and there (which seems to be the what we’re doing quite a bit of the time).

This mornings conversation was prompted by DS1 reading some trivia facts from I’m not sure where. The fact that started the discussion was the exact number of Hersheys bar squares it would take to stretch from the earth to the moon. After the sharing of this tidbit of vital information, DS2 proceeds to explain how he was going to go about eating that long string of chocolate. This led to a 3-way discussion of all the logistical problems with the plan and various solutions and brainstorming for solving them.

Shame the ride to school is only 20 minutes because I’m pretty sure that discussion could’ve carried on for quite some time yet. Perhaps it will be revisited.

100 Things – #29

When the Dove Promises bag I thought was empty turns out to actually have one left in it, hiding in the folds.

This is particularly happiness-inducing when I haven’t replenished the supply and thought, before finding the surprise chocolate, that I was facing a chocolate-free day.  As everyone knows, it’s never a good day to go chocolate free.

100 Things #28

Having a technically inclined husband.  The specific inspiration for this post is the utilization of a thing he set up on the Tivo where it is networked with the computers.  Why does this make me happy?  Well, I get emails from, for example, National Geographic channel.  It’s about a new show that sounds hella cool.  Back in the dark ages (i.e. a few years ago when there was no networked tivo in this house.  There was a Tivo, just not networked.) I would’ve had to either remember to go set it to record later (which would never have happened) OR get up from whatever I was doing at my desk and go set it right then and there.  Which would result in my getting totally derailed from whatever I was doing previously.  Now, I just start putting the IP address of the Tivo (which I don’t actually know, I just start typing 19 and it pops down in the list) and boom! I’ve got the Tivo search interface, find the show, set it to record and done.

That makes me happy.  Not that I ever actually watch any of the stuff since I don’t really watch TV.  But I could.  And should I ever want to watch tv, I certainly won’t have to worry about whether there’s anything good on.  There’s about 92 hours worth of stuff I set to watch because of an email or something one of the friends who live in my computer said. And I never even left my chair to get it there.

Of course, his ability to fix the A/C, dishwasher, non-working hard-drives etc. is also all good.  But I get a bigger kick out of the Tivo thing.

100 things #25-27

25. Night blooming jasmine

We have one right outside the large bedroom window.  When it blooms (at night, obviously) during the season when I can open windows, it fills my entire house with the most intoxicating scent.  It is impossible to be miserable in a house filled with the scent of jasmine.  Even more fortuitously, just now it is getting ready to bloom (I caught a hint of the scent the other night) and it *just* cooled off enough to open windows at night.  It feels like such a waste when it blooms when it is just too hot to open windows.  I don’t think that happens often, though.  Or maybe it does and I just don’t notice because my windows are closed so I can’t smell it and it only blooms at night so I wouldn’t see it.

26.  The brown van coming to a stop in front of my gate and then backing in.  He’s almost always bringing something for me.

27. Looking at my schedule and seeing the neither of the 2 weekly Saturday soccer games start before 11.  There is just something so very wrong with having to get out of the house on a Saturday at a time earlier than school days.  8 a.m. games most definitely do not make this list.

100 Things – #23 & #24

#23 – DH cooking. Which he almost always does on the weekends. He’s a pretty good cook, too. Even if he weren’t, though, as long as it was deemed edible by the offspring and I didn’t have to do the cooking, it would make me happy.

This post was inspired by tonight’s spaghetti bolognese.

#24 – The arrival of The Official Best Day of the Year. This is a floating date and you never know when it’s gonna be till it gets here. The OBDotY is the first day that you can open the windows. Turn off the A/C and let the breeze in (without being uncomfortably warm, I mean. It doesn’t count if you open the window unless it is pleasant to do so. I notice that this date tends to fall very near what used to be my Official Worst Day of the Year when I lived in Canada. That would be the first day in the fall when you have to scrape your car windshield before driving to work.

I should note that while this falls as #24 on this list (because it is in no particular other than when I think of it), this item is, in fact, well up in the top 10 when ranked by exactly *how happy* they make me.