Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit. ~ Hosea Ballou
Three Questions, December 22, 2024
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
Today it was my first views of the red rocks of Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. My home for the next several days.
What did I learn today?
Today I saw the biggest damn Road Runner that I’ve ever seen. I had no idea they could get this big. The Road Runner I saw was damn near the size of a turkey!
What made me happy today?
This one was easy today, getting my camp set up, hanging out in my hammock listening to music, sitting by the camp fire under clear skies and massive stars.
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. ~ Epictetus
Three Questions, December 20, 2024
What did I encounter that made me happy today?
Today I’m doing something that make me very happy, hitting the road. I’m a nomad at heart and traveling and heading for new places always makes me happy. As I hit the road this afternoon I was driving while the sun set. Seeing gorgeous sunsets in the mirrors of my car was the most beautiful thing I saw today.
What did I learn today?
Today, due to some traffic issues my GPS gave me a new path from the 101 to the 5. It was a lovely change and even afforded me a quick rest stop where I could get something to eat.
What made me happy today?
As I mentioned above, what made me happy today was just being back on the road.
Most folks are as happy as they make their mind up to be. ~ Abraham Lincoln
Three Questions, December 21, 2024
What did I encounter that was beautiful today?
The most beautiful thing I saw today is one of my favorite sights on the drive to Vegas. Just as you come over the hill before you leave California heading East is this tremendous solar field. This field uses a mirror towers to heat fluids to drive the power creation process. The light from the mirrors across the fields in the dusty desert air is gorgeous.
What did I learn today?
Happy Solstice Day! Today I learned where the term solstice comes from and now you will know as well. The word solstice from the Latin words sol, meaning sun, and sistere, meaning to stand still. The term was used by ancient astronomers to describe the day when the sun appeared to stop moving
What made me happy today?
One of the things I miss about living in Southern California is the prevalence of Del Taco restaurants. They have two items on their menu that I really dig, their egg and cheese breakfast burritos and their chicken soft tacos. Made me happy to snag to an egg and cheese burrito this morning.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror. ~ Khalil Gibran
Three Questions, December 19, 2024
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful experience I had today? What did I learn today?
Today, the most beautiful thing I encountered, and what I learned are the same thing. I was online and saw an image and a video of something called a sea angel. They are small swimming slugs who live in the Arctic Ocean. The normal foot of the slug has evolved into wing-like structures and these things are absolutely beautiful.
Sea Angel vs Sea Butterfly
What made me happy today?
So what made me happy today doesn’t make me the best person, but it was a bit of self-induced karma that led me to a bit of schadenfreude. I have to admit I love when karma comes around and bites someone in the ass.
Research has shown that the best way to be happy is to make each day happy. ~ Deepak Chopra
Three Questions, December 18, 2024
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
As I was leaving work today, the sun was setting over the ocean and lighting up a building on campus. It had this crazy glow from inside, made the building seem like it was coming alive.
What did I learn today?
Another day of digging around on the internet to learn something new. And today what I learned blew me away, I learned that a typical cumulus cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds. Once you think about it, it makes sense water is heavy and clouds are huge but the number shocked me.
What made me happy today?
Had tow separate colleagues today in different conversations comment on how much they’ve learned from me since we started working together. It was nice to feel like I’m making a difference.
Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit. ~ Hosea Ballou
Three Questions, December 17, 2024
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
The most beautiful thing I saw today was the view from the top of our campus looking out over the Pacific Ocean. It’s absolutely one of the best things about my job that I have that view a hundred yards from my office.
What did I learn today?
I had to dig for this one, realized I really hadn’t learned anything in the course of the day. So one of the good things about this three question exercise is that it forces you to look for beauty and happiness and even to learn something if you didn’t. So I Googled some science facts and found a really amazing one. I would have bet you dollars to donuts that identical twins have identical fingerprints, they do not. Turns out that growth differences in the womb actually have an impact on how the whorls of your fingerprints develop. Absolutely blew me away.
What made me happy today?
This one was easy today, the kids from our child development center brought me a Christmas card with all of their smiling faces on the card, those kids are my absolute joy in my job.
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. ~ Denis Waitley
Three Questions, December 16, 2024
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I experienced today?
The most beautiful thing I saw today was a picture of someone close to me dressed in their PhD robes for their graduation. She’s worked really hard to achieve this and I’m really proud of her.
What did I learn today?
I was looking at weather for my upcoming trip to the Valley of Fire and stumbled into a site on the geologic history of the park. It was really interesting, didn’t realize how old the rock was in the park and excited to realize that there are actually some really old fossil areas in the park. A new thing to look for this year.
What made me happy today?
First was finishing my Christmas shopping, happy to get everything ordered and out. While I was writing tonight I saw the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was on TV. Now while I’m not a fan of Christmas or many things Christmas related I have a special spot for that show. First of all, it has been noticed when I was younger and had more hair and a full, red tinted beard that I might bear a bit of a resemblance to Yukon Cornelius. Second, I’ve always felt like a misfit, so the whole misfit toy island story line kind of touches me. But the big reason Rudolph hits pretty hard is because of a really amazing memory of a peppermint kiss. My first real girlfriend was during my first year of college. A friend invited us to watch Rudolph in her dorm room and we were drinking peppermint schnaps. Suddenly, Karie and I found ourselves alone, we’d only been dating for a couple of weeks and now alone, a little high on peppermint schnaps we had our first kiss. It was really amazing and is a memory that always makes me smile.
Those yuletide-loving, sickly-sweet, nog-sucking cheer mongers! I really don’t like ’em. No, I don’t. ~ The Grinch (Dr. Suess)
Christmas Sucks
It’s that time of year again, my least favorite of all. While I do enjoy giving people meaningful gifts, for the most part I really believe Christmas sucks. I do a post like this every year when the weight of the system finally tanks my mood. I do it so that the other people who struggle this time of year can know that they are not alone in struggling to be happy during the Christmas season. My favorite Christmas movie is Gremlins, as a young man seeing it in the theater, the magnificent Phoebe Cates’ character proclaims she hates Christmas. My twenty year-old self was in love, she was beautiful, talented, we thought alike and unfortunately she was also imaginary.
I have my own reasons for not liking the holiday, not quite as dramatic, but here’s the scene from Gremlins.
This time of year it just all gets to me. It’s a very busy time at work getting fall semester wrapped up and it’s also usually the time of the semester we get a number of student complaints. So the stress of the semester crests, everyone is in a hurry to get a million things done before break, so everyone wants something from you. It’s also the time of year where daylight goes away and we leave work in the dark. It makes it harder for me to exercise, particular to walk outside and get any sunshine. It gets colder, rainier and generally just gloomier. People understandably get tied up in their family and so those of us who don’t have family around, or large circles of friends end up increasingly more isolated. The invitations you get are not much help, there’s not a lot more awkward than being at a family holiday gathering when you’re not family, so while it’s nice to be asked often it’s just easier to decline. So it’s a lonely, dark, cold and depressing time of year for me and frankly more people than you realize. While I try really hard to give good gifts, most other people don’t seem to value that nearly as much. All in all, I look forward to the holiday season ending.
My solution to this has been to eliminate all of those things I don’t like. So this time of year I usually flee to the desert to go camping and hiking. Over the last ten years that has been the Mojave Desert, either Anza Borego State Park or more recently it’s been Valley of Fire State Park. A few days in the desert, where it’s warmer during the day, where I’m out in nature all day, have camp fires at night and where I can sleep in the cold, quiet nights. I love it. There is something special and revitalizing about the desert, bracketed with a couple of days in Las Vegas for good food and meeting with some friends, it makes for a much more palatable Christmas than I used to endure.
That’s how I deal, and here is my plea on behalf of those who don’t find Christmas a warm and wonderful time of year. Please just be cognizant that not everyone loves this time of year. Extend those invitations even if they are always declined, while they likely won’t come, the invitation does mean something. If you have someone in your life who isn’t a big Christmas person, lay off the Grinch bullshit. Think about that video from Gremlins, some of us have really good reasons for not being jolly this time of year, some of us have PTSD around this holiday. Not suggesting you dial back your own merriment even a drop, just don’t hammer folks for not sharing in your yuletide spirit. And have a happy holiday season my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. ~ Dalai Lama
Three Questions, December 15, 2024
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I encountered today?
I was running errands and after dinner and there was a bright full moon in the sky poking through a hole in fluffy rows of clouds. It bathed the the national veteran’s cemetery in a really eerily beautiful blue light.
What did I learn today?
It’s a happy but small thing, I learned today that a few other teams lost in addition to my favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, but because the other teams lost the Steelers have clinched a spot in the playoffs.
What made me happy today?
What made me happy today was getting the majority of my Christmas shopping finished, getting gifts boxed and bagged and ready for shipping and distribution tomorrow.
The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others. ~ Robert Baden-Powell
You can find the background to The Three Questions in my recent post about it. I’ll be answering the questions each day for the next year and putting this experience into a book. Here we go!
What was the most beautiful thing I experienced today?
I was watching the University of Tennessee basketball team, I follow them. They are currently ranked number one in the country and were playing against Illinois in Illinois. It was a wild game, extremely close and with just a few seconds left a player got the ball, dribbled the length of the court, went up for a lay up, switched ball hands in mid-air and banked in a game winning lay up for a one point victory with no time left on the clock. It was an absolutely beautiful play.
What did I learn today?
Today I learned a bit about Parkinson’s Disease symptoms. A family member has the disease and is starting to deal with some things, so I thought it was time to start getting a bit more knowledgeable about symptoms and disease progression.
What made me happy today?
What made me happy today was finishing up some of my Christmas shopping For my littlest niece and nephews I’m determined every year to make sure they get their presents before Christmas morning. This means getting presents from California to New York in time for Christmas. This year, with everything going on around my heart condition I’ve been really behind. So tonight I’ll be wrapping and boxing to ship out tomorrow.
The Ministry of Happiness 