Happiness List 04.21.11

Things that made me happy/for which I was thankful yesterday:

1. Eating okonomiyaki with A at lunch on a workday

2. Leaving the office before the sky lost its blue hue for the first time in awhile

3. Abundant warm sunlight when walking to and from lunch

4. A toasted everything bagel with low fat scallion cream cheese

5. Crunchy toasty onion rings from Burger King

(This is kind of like a "day in review" type thing, isn't it? Interesting how that turned out, considering my past failures at doing a "week in review" but it's not like I've kept up with this either.)

(Also interesting but not entirely surprising that it centers around food. But it's often the little things that make someone happy, right? I am really trying to focus on the positive instead of the negative when making these lists even though you could read it as "X makes M happy because Y (related item to X) makes her unhappy." Positive focus!)

Edited to add: I thought it had been a long time since the last time I left work before dark. Based on my last post, it was a week ago! Add to that the fact that I left work due to my eye during the afternoon on Monday and worked from home on Tuesday, and that's not that many days inbetween where it's been dark. But it's felt like forever.

Little Things

I've been reflective lately. Thinking about what really matters in life. I suppose this has been going on for awhile, intensified around the time I was hospitalized and some recent events (which I would rather not discuss on the blog) just have me thinking about time, connections and happiness. I'm trying a new thing where, despite all the annoying or frustrating or less than optimal things that can happen throughout the day, I'm choosing at the end of the day to think about the things that make me happy or for which I'm thankful. I think maybe I'll write about them here to (a) force myself to write and (b) keep myself thinking about the things that make me happy instead of the things that make me not so happy. I really believe it can make a difference to focus on the positive.

I'm not going to list out the obvious things (A, family, people in my life, being healthy, having a place to live and not lacking for food, etc.) because, while those are all things I am very grateful for, they would be the same things everyday. I'm going to focus more on the little things - those unplanned, sometimes unexpected, things that just happen throughout the day to make it better. It's not a complete list of every single thing that made me happy during the day - just the 3 or so that stand out when I ask myself at the end of the day: "what made you happy today?"

So today's "happiness list":

- I was able to go to the chiropractor/PT, which meant I got to leave the office before it got dark and just worked from home later.

- The sunlight was really intense as the sun was setting and shone directly on my office window. I basked in the warm sunlight for about 5 minutes while getting some stuff done and it felt wonderful.

- We opened this box of coconut vanilla macaroons that we bought last weekend at Stop and Shop. They were deliciously coconut-ty and so moist. I love macaroons.

What made you happy today?

Hotel Research

We're almost done booking our hotels for our spring trip, and it occurred to me during this process that this is the first time in 2.5 years that we haven't used Priceline to book hotels during our vacation. It's a completely different thought and research process than what we usually do.

Even though you can only choose location/star level on Priceline and have no choice of which hotel, we still do a fair amount of research. Through bidding sites, you can find out which hotels are likely to come up (based on other users' history), and then look up the current room rates for those hotels for your dates. This helps you figure out a good bidding price (especially with the number of rebids you have) and a bidding strategy. You can also read reviews on the possible hotels and see if you might want to try a different star level to get what you want. Once you bid, it's all out of your hands and what Priceline delivers is a surprise. But bidding, to me, is fun.

Choosing a hotel on your own is so different. You need to check recommendations, reviews, exact locations of hotels. There's a lot more research involved. I can't even remember the last time we did this type of research. Maybe we never did, since the only other trips on which we've chosen hotels, it's been through travel agents or we booked directly and knew where we wanted to be. (I'm not counting wedding hotels in any of this.) Thank goodness for the helpful folks in the forums on Fodors because over the years, they have given so many suggestions that it helped narrow things down a little bit. There are just so many hotels that the research can get a little overwhelming without someone to point you in the right direction based on their past experience.

We did think about Priceline for this trip, but there were very limited options and it was only available in 1 out of the 4 places we were going. It's going to cost us a little more this way (and we're paying in Euros) but we know what we're getting and where we're going. Priceline was the first place we looked since we had previously used it in Germany with no problems, but this time, it just didn't fit with what we needed to do. I can't wait to see what the hotels look like and cannot wait to finally be on vacation!