My First Year of Happy Post - 1/52

The way I understand it, you find three things about your week that made you happy and as someone who's been struggling quite a lot with my health over the last year, it does seem like a good idea to look for some positives.  My friend Clare from "The Summerhouse by the Sea" has been doing her year of happy for some time now and it's nice to see the things that make her happy over the course of a week - it seems to me that it doesn't always have to be big things, often it will be small simple things that will bring a out smile.

My first is that I'm grateful to have survived the storm last Sunday night/Monday morning pretty much unscathed.  I was told by one of my neighbours that the storm reached it's peak here around 4am, but I actually slept through that bit, which is better than I managed in the storm of 1987, when it sounded as though the roof was being ripped off - that was scary!  The first thing I noticed in the morning was that my bath had a load of little black bits in it which must have somehow been blown through the extractor fan, I was a bit worried when I went outside and saw a big piece of what was either someone's greenhouse or conservatory roof wedged under the front of my car but amazingly my car didn't have a scratch - we were very lucky, though my heart goes out to the families of those who lost their lives in the storm.

I'd prepared for the storm just in case we lost power, I cheated with the radio - I put batteries in it to save having to wind the handle and checked the batteries in the torch too in case we lost power - I didn't need either but some of the outlying villages around here lost power for several days.  The picture below is of my bedside table with some of my storm preparations - the wooden duck/goose in the background was carved by me when I was expecting my son, my OH used to come to the wood carving classes too but suddenly decided I shouldn't go anymore so I never got the chance to finish, but as its reasonably bird shaped, I've kept it in the hope of being able to finish it off one day.  Perhaps I'll take some close up photos one day so you can see how rough my poor birdie has been looking for the past 20+ years!

My second happy thing was finding my camera's card reader which meant I could download all the photos I've taken recently, including the one below of Dottie the Dalmatian picking out a pumpkin which I took nearly two weeks ago.  We didn't bring that particular pumpkin home because it looked as though it already had a face and I wasn't sure I could bring myself to attack it with a knife when it was looking at me like that!

My final happy thing was spending some time with my seven year old niece today while my sister was at work and the school was having a teacher training day.  We spent a lovely few hours colouring in some Hello Kitty pictures I found on the internet and giving my niece her first sewing lesson, we used the Marianne Design owl die set, but didn't use all the pieces to make it simpler - K did a lot of the sewing and stuffing and I think she did brilliantly, I'm just annoyed with myself for forgetting to pack some glue to stick the googly eyes on with.  I'm now completely exhausted and in agony so its unlikely I'll get much sleep tonight even though I'm so tired, but I don't really care - I had such a great time!