Happiness Project Toolbox

Although my 'No negativity out of my mouth for an hour' resolution has ended & I didn't log the hours of non-negativity on the resolution chart often, the act of creating the resolution helped me to be mindful of the negativity I spoke & reign it in.

I am grateful that I woke up this morning, that I have a precious human life that I will not waste; I am grateful to have work & I am working towards a career that I am passionate about; I am grateful that I have a home, the basics & many who love me

I've wanted to submit 2 poems to The New Yorker: I decided which 2 to submit (finally - with help from friends), turned them into PDFs today (finally) & submitted them! I sent in 'My Imagination' & 'You' & have to wait up to 3 months to hear back.

I don't want to be a corporate wage slave. I want my career to reflect who I am, my values & ethics, and passions. Updating a mega-corporation's credit card site is the antithesis of what I want my job to be & so I am changing it, one step at a time.

Watching the movie also underscored the idea of going through life with the childlike wonder of the 'treasures in the drug store window' or the 'Look mommy look! A dog!' moments - Gretchen mentions ordinary dog but her daughter sees 'A doooooggg!'...

I just watched Gretchen's movie 'The Years Are Short' & was really impacted by it. The movie serves to drive the point home that life is every moment we live now, not just those awesome moments we try to remember. That realization brings happiness.

Although each day brings it's challenges, I delight in being able to experience them & work through them. The challenges as well as the joys are what make life life & I feel gratitude that I can enjoy both the highs & lows.

I am grateful today for the beautiful day outside; I am grateful for the desire & ability to play my flute when I get home from the gym tonight, no matter how rusty I may still be, how weak my chops still are - I can play & it makes me so very happy.

I've been able to get so much stuff done today - a few things from my resolutions for this weekend. A lot today is in preparation for an all day outing tomorrow to the Concours d'Elegance. Talk about scheduling play! Tomorrow is a whole day of it! :)

I talked to 2 people about starting a Happiness Project Group & received a positive response - w00t! Now to talk to a few more people & get started... :)

A Dorito with tons & tons of cheesy stuff on it! :)

I've noticed that the more I play/practice my flute the more people who are close to me seem to be taking offense at the time I'm spending playing/practicing. This bothers me & makes me wonder 'Why?'. I'm going to have to get to the bottom of this...

Very hard for me to stick with my 'no negativity will come out of my mouth today' resolution. It's a very ambitious goal & work makes it an especially hard resolution to keep. Perhaps I'll modify it to an hour at a time - a more realistic goal.

A good day. My outlook about my work is getting better; maybe it's due to my commitment that my current work situation is not permanent & it is up to me to change it. And until it's changed, it's up to me to change my attitude about it.

Thankfully the Happiness Project sites aren't blocked my my job's content filter - otherwise my easiest afternoon happiness boost (reading the Happiness Project blog/working on my project here) would be inaccessible to me & what a pity that would be!

So it's corny, but today is the first day of the rest of my life - again! I'm starting my happiness project all over again & what got me re-inspired? Starting to read The Happiness Project book! Many thanks to Gretchen for getting me going again! :)

My new site design is done & I am so stoked! Of course I have some tweaking to do, I think I'm going to remove the digital art & add an about page & create a site exclusively for my digital art. Methinks what design that ends up with so will my blog.

I am so thankful I started my Happiness Project - I will definitely be needing my project now more than ever so that I can stay positive & help my mom stay positive while she is undergoing cancer treatment.

It's been so stressful lately due to my mom's cancer diagnosis. She had a hysterectomy on steroids Tuesday & Saturday we found out that she will need 2 rounds of chemo & 1 of radiation as her Dr. can't be certain he go it all. Thank the gods for this

Recent circumstances at my job are inciting me even more to really ramp up the freelancing & start my own web/graphic design/seo business, as being repeatedly reminded of mistakes made in front of the entire team has happened one too many times.

I started a blog a part of July's resolutions: http://electrikdream.wordpress.com/

Redesigning electrik-dream again as the design is way too simple & it occurred to me that if I've built these bad-ass websites for other folks then my website for my business ought to bad-ass too; the current design is way too abstract & arty & blah.

This is sort of a continuation of 'Back to work...blues or inspiration?' for me to use as a place to log my work/accomplishments/setbacks/etc I have while I go through the process of starting my own business, with the goal of only working for myself.

I tried the 'act like I want to feel' mindset again today at work and it worked for the most part; there are still some things that I have to work on how much I let them get to me, though, especially when they are things beyond my control.

Boo on that last post about just another release day; it was the complete antithesis of what this is supposed to be about. Duh!!! again. I've been having quite a few 'Duh!' moments lately. Perhaps I should label them 'Aha!' moments rather than 'Duh!'

...with the extra added bonus of having the new guys errors to deal with, as well as trusting a seasoned employee to research a release issue only to find, after she'd gone home for the day, that she hadn't done the in-depth research needed as usual.

I've realized that there will only be 1 person always guaranteed to appreciate when I bust my butt & go above and beyond - me! I need to work for myself in order to be inspired to go to work everyday & be successful doing what I love to do. Duh!!!

Being back to work makes me realize more than ever that I need to stop procrastinating & begin my plan to turn part-time freelance web design into full-time web design business.

Now that vacation is over & I created my 'what I actually got done on vacation' list, I realized I got quite a bit more done on my vacation than I had planned; there's still more gardening to do (of course) but it was a very productive long weekend!

I'm so excited to have 4 whole days of doing nothing other than exactly what I want to do; it's very relaxing & refreshing! :)

Now that I'm done venting about my super crappy day at work yesterday, I should actually be able to begin to enjoy my time off from work.

Like any other release day we had plenty of errors on both sides but I'm thankful none were mine and I didn't get mad at any of them which is a first. Holy run-on sentence Batman!