yay happiness.

In an effort to actually work on a Happiness Project every day, for a (very non-calendar) month, i’ve made a list of Happiness Project tasks to spread out over the next two weeks (day 15 is ‘Re-plan Happiness Project.’ Because i suck at planning things that far in advance, and besides it’s quite likely i’ll come up with whole different happiness-inducing ideas in the next one week, never mind two).

Yesterday was Planning. Today is actually getting around to reading The Happiness Project. Tomorrow is deciding what, exactly, i’m going to use as a ‘happiness toolbox.’

There is an entire Happiness Project Toolbox site, set up by Gretchen Rubin as a sort of add-on to her book and blog, but i’m not sure i’m going to use it. I know full well i wouldn’t use most of it – it’s either stuff i already do, and prefer doing, somewhere else, or it’s stuff i wouldn’t find conducive to my happiness at all (group resolutions?! Introvert alert = not gonna happen. Unless it’s such a ridiculously small group as to make calling it a group almost silly, or so huge as to already have its own movement and website.) I don’t feel the stuff i would use the HPT for is really enough to warrant setting up yet another account on yet another website.

The alternatives are my regular blog, or a Tumblr blog. The former i feel might be a bit unwieldy for this and the latter is… well, it’s not a whole new account, but it is a whole new something i have to set up and maintain and may feel guilty about if i don’t bother with it after my self-imposed Happy Month. Ah well.

I think my favourite happiness commandment of Gretchen’s is ‘don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.’ There is no perfect ‘toolbox’ for me, but there’s three perfectly good alternatives. Just gotta grab one.

and other stuff.

So. Goal #80? Renewing my passport?
This is kind of important because a) My passport is my only photo ID. I don’t drive, i never bothered getting a non-drivers-license government-issued ID (well. besides the passport), i never even bothered getting a college ID once i stopped going to a school which outright required it (i’m lazy like that. ‘I have one photo ID. This is enough. I am not going to waste my time bantering about with stuff i don’t need.’) No passport means no pubs, no piercings, no lots of fun things. And b) I still want to go overseas in the near future. Passport thus required.
Now, my current passport was issued while i was planning a trip to Russia in June 2005. (Note the date. 2005.) So i pulled out my passport to see exactly when it expired. 02 Jan – ‘noooooo, it’s already expired’ – 2015.
Yeah. Passports last ten years, not five. I’m an idiot sometimes.
I’m not even going to bother looking up whether or not it’s possible to renew a passport this early. Even if it is, it’s ridiculous for me to do so. Debating whether i can properly mark this ‘done’, as a self-completing goal, or ‘unable to complete’, as a sherry-is-an-idiot goal.

Actual no-really-i-did-accomplish-something goal: I got my bonsai tree! It’s a beautiful little Hawaiian umbrella tree, which is supposed to be pretty easy to take care of. Now i just have to keep it alive – but i’m starting to think i’m not so bad at taking care of plants as previously believed… I have a pineapple plant which, unexpectedly enough, is actually starting to grow. It’s my bamboo plant (supposedly the easiest plant possible to take care of) which is doing the worst, but it’s also the oldest. Maybe i just need to learn how to really take care of it, beyond simple watering.