Nikki’s Web Journal

Things To Be Happy About

• truckdriver’s breakfast: fried eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, hashbrowns, pancakes, and lots of coffee
• straight black skirts
• denim + red
• wrapping your hair in a towel
• empire waist tops, sweaters and dresses
• egg cartons (genius design!)
• childhood candy events: Hallowe’en, Easter egg hunts
• caramelized onions (and mushrooms) (on a pizza)
• graph paper
• sentence trees
• breakfast buffets
• putting perfume on at pulse points before a date
• remembering a kiss
• wallpaper on the ceiling
• doing laundry for someone else
• sweater weather
• middle school dance class
• pocket watches
• familiar items in a different laguage (well known brands’ packaging, receipts, chain store signs)
• Christmas Eve candlelight services
• light in the windows on a cold, dark, snowy night
• knitting with hand-dyed, handspun yarn in natural light
• the colour green (oddly enough) and, increasingly, yellow
• freshly baked bread
• spreading jam with a spoon
• engaging all five senses
• snow sparkling in the moonlight
• Baskin Robbins’ mint chocolate chip ice cream
• Bailey’s coffee
• drinking unfamiliar cocktails
• grocery shopping
• really, really, really sad songs
• mushrooms (as food, and as design objects)
• cherries
• Concept cars
• The number 25
• Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, The Most Beautiful Piece of Music in the World
• Knowing that there’s a tin full of (my) homemade chocolate chip cookies on top of my fridge
• Playing Trivia with my mom
• ze frank. i love this man. i will never get tired of listening to him.
• The way my house smells after a cooking and baking marathon.
• Mary Engelbreit
• Brambly Hedge
• 복분자 술, Korean raspberry liquor
• Texturally significant bread
• Marukawa Grape Bubble Gum
• Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf’s Moroccan Mint Latte
• Prowstar’s or Starbucks’ Green Tea Latte
• Yoplait’s “Doctor Capsule” raspberry drinking yogurt
• “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature”
• Area rugs
• Being well rested enough to wake up at 6 am without an alarm clock……on a regular basis
• Listening to the fall of a steady all-night rain on the plants outside your window
• Rooftops
• Clusters of dark brown kimchi pots beside a wall or in someone’s yard
• Fresh pineapple
• Cyrano de Bergerac
• A hot mug of something nice to drink, steaming away on the table beside me
• The expression, to give someone/something “the hairy eyeball”
• The long shhhhhhhhhhhglurp that condensed mushroom soup makes coming out of the can when upended
• Wendy’s expressions, “for the love of baked beans”, and “for crying in the sink!”
• Baileys Irish Cream
• Makeup from Missha and The Face Shop
• Red shoes
• The sound of my refrigerator coming on in the middle of the night
• The quiet ticking of my clocks in each room of my house
• Coming home on a fall evening to my cozy little apartment, where i have left one or two small lamps lit to greet me on my return
• Kind taxi drivers who listen to your whole sad break-up story and then give you hope by telling you that you will meet one day soon a kind, cool, handsome, rich guy, get married, have kids, and have lovely conversations at the kitchen table while sharing a big steaming pot of kimchi jjigae together
• Making spaghetti-o’s entirely by accident, and having a total food flashback
• Making a random call to my mom to ask for a recipe–this time, it was beef stroganoff, last time i think it was lemon bars?
• The spoonerized expression, “one swell foop”
• Children’s poet Shel Silverstein, especially “The Meehoo with an Exactlywatt”