Happiness is...

...finding an old Sephora gift card that has been lost but certainly not forgotten, and THEN discovering that it still has quite a bit of money left on it. Huzzah!

....zooming past traffic on your spiffy red (albeit pre-owned, ahem) Vespa. LOVE. We had bought a Kymco back in SA and brought it to DC with us, but thanks to the snowiness/general grossness of the winter, have had it sitting unused in our backyard. But with the nice weather, it has now crossed into scooter season. We'd put a little aside when we left SA for me to have a scooter because while I enjoy being The Texan's cupcake (what scooter riders call someone who would be, on a Harley, the bitch), it is far too crowded for long rides. And we'd figured that it would help The Texan acclimate more to DC if he and I could drive all over it in our respective scooters. Plus the four mile commute to my office was taking a freaking HOUR each way and slowly sapping my will to live. So far, I'm loving it. The only thing I don't care for is having to lock the it up: I am, to put it bluntly, a hot mess when it comes to things mechanical, and having to twine a bike chain through the spokes and then get the U-lock to go around the ends....there have been times when I've come *thisclose* to just hurling my helmet off into the distance and giving up the scooter entirely. And in SA, scooters were so rare that people didn't know what to do with them; apparently stealing them was never even an after-thought, to the point to where you could actually just leave your helmet on the bike and everything would be there when you got back. Memories.

...working the kitchen sink's faucet properly. (See above about inability to work anything with more than one moving part.) Yesterday, the faucet broke so off we trundled to Home Depot to get a replacement. Unfortunately, the replacement doesn't work either (this is after The Texan, who has built houses from scratch and thus knows what he's doing, attempted to install it, not me), so we need to get a replacement for the replacement. In the meantime, we have the equivalent of a hose in our kitchen sink. Yesterday I was using the contraption for the first time and not really paying sufficient attention to what I was doing, which allowed the hose to get away from me. While spewing water. At full blast. This could have been a kitchen catastrophe, except that Scratchel happened to hear me in the kitchen and had just come around the corner to see what I was up to. That poor cat took the hose of water straight to his face. I turned it off but after the damage had been done. I tried to wipe him down to get the worst of the water off of him but all he would do is hide under the table where I couldn't get at him and look at me reproachfully. Still makes me laugh to think about it. So maybe happiness is not working the sink properly.

...finally having a working phone again, with all the bells and whistles. I am currently on my fifth (5th) Blackberry in about two years, all of which have died unnatural demises that thankfully happened under the warranty. Every time that happens, I have to go through a song and dance with my phone company about how I want a new one expedited to me and NO I will not be paying to ship a replacement for their shoddily made equipment. It works, but that victory is short-lived, as I then must reload the damn thing with all my music/email/ringtones/settings/etc. It is, as you can imagine, a giant pain in the ass. I'm presently killing time transferring music back on it, a job that is time-sensitive since I leave tomorrow for a business trip and need my phone to have music on it so I have something to listen to (after I killed my third music player, The Texan and I decided it would be best just to use my phone for that sort of thing). I probably will call it a day in a bit because there's only so much I can ramble on about here (lucky you guys). Plus it's The Amazing Race time!