Making Me Happy This Week – 4/1/2018

I didn’t take a lot of photos last week.  I almost think I need to make this list in real time sometimes.  By the time the week is over, and if I didn’t hardly take any photos, I’ve forgotten all the things that made me happy! 

Here’s what’s making me happy:

• Sunny and 70’s weather all week!  San Diego returns to form!
• Got trained at work on our new financial planning system.
• Todd’s cooking:  the sweet & sour chicken with fresh pineapples and noodles, and meatball marinara from scratch!  Yum, yum, yum!
• Daily free bagels from Panera for two weeks!  I’m a rewards member and they sometimes give me offers.  I got daily free bagels for the entire month of November before!
• Working from home on Friday.  I hardly ever get to work from home anymore due to my meeting schedule.  Sigh.
• Noodle getting obsessed with his puffy bed that I bought him over six months ago!  Sometimes it takes cats SO LONG to decide that they actually like something!
• Opening Day of the 2018 Major League Baseball season!
• Hour long walk at the beach, followed by our favorite pizza!  It actually was quite cloudy on Saturday, but I LOVED the long walk and getting out for fresh ocean air!
• Finally submitting our taxes and getting large refund back due to our solar panel installation in 2017!  We were waiting on Todd’s corrected W2 from his work.  We celebrated with Creamistry ice cream!
• Pitch Perfect 3 – I still love it, even though it’s so cheesy.  I love the singing and it’s still funny to me. 
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• Getting invited to our next door neighbors’ house for Sunday rib dinner.
• Dyed my hair purple with just shampoo.  (See ice cream photo above.)
• Finally getting paid the rest of my annual bonus.  When they paid me the bonus two weeks ago, it was less than I had expected.  Turned out they only paid me a prorated 7 months of bonus for 2017 instead of 10 months.  They “forgot” to calculate my bonus for Oct – Dec, when I returned to work from my leave of absence.  Super-lame, but glad I got the rest paid to me.

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Making Me Happy This Week–2/25/2018

Oh my this week had its moments.  There were some tough things at work, and some good things.  Every night we came home, had dinner, and basically fell asleep on the couch from exhaustion.  But the week ended well and we bounced back. 

Here’s what’s making me happy this week:

• One of the VPs that I support at work (managing his $30M budget) wrote me a thank you card.  And enclosed an AMEX gift card.  I never take people appreciating me for granted.  Finance people are usually not valued at my work, so to have a good relationship with my VPs and them knowing the value that I bring to the table makes me happy.
• Surviving a tough week at work.
• Cold weather and wearing winter(ish) outfits.  On Tuesday I woke up to 37 degree weather and wondered where I was!  I think I wore boots all week.
• Trying out Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot.  I’ve had Taiwanese hot pot plenty of times, but this was Mongolian hot pot.  The flavors are quite different and new to me.  You choose a soup base and ingredients that you want to cook in the soup base.  We liked it well enough but it’s probably not something we would go often.
• This pink bike.  I can see myself riding along the beach boardwalk on it.
• My new Franco Sarto leopard mule slides.  It was too cold to wear this week, but I will be wearing it soon!
• Finding out that my company’s results for 2017 means a 111% target bonus payout for us.
• Day off on Wednesday.  I take one day off per month for my mental health.  I need to reset from the work stress, relax, and just have a general “Me Day”.  It’s always my favorite day of the month.
• My new pink hair all over.  All my women friends love it.  The men at work don’t know what to think of it, ha!  Todd likes it though, and he’s the only man that counts.  I’ll do a hair post soon and talk about what was done to get this look, and what my stylist taught me about it.  I did have pink hair back in the summer during my leave too, but it wasn’t all over my head like this.  #pinkhairdontcare 
• Impromptu dinner out at Phil’s BBQ on Wednesday night.  Blurry photo but good memories!
• This.  I’m a super-spreadsheet nerd and this makes me happy!
• 2.5 mile “walk & talk” at Miramar Lake.
• Laundry/utility room organizing project.  I’ll do a post with before and after photos.
• Reorganized my closet so that my fall/winter shirts are in color order again.  As you can see my favorite colors to wear looks to be red, blue, black, and gray.  Will do a closet post soon again.  I also put all my cardigans into the left side of Todd’s closet (he doesn’t use that side), with my boots underneath.  Also, these awesome things keep your tall boots upright and together.  Love them!
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• A clean(er) oven!  There was some good build-up in our oven such that every time we turned it on, the entire house smelled like burned oil.  It was gross.  We cleaned it out this weekend.
• My organized shoe rack.  It was in disarray but now it’s organized.  Todd gets the last two tiers and I get the rest, ha ha.  It really stores a ton of shoes, especially if you put the left shoe upside down against the right shoe.  I also turn my flip flops and sandals sideways so I could store more that way.  I seriously love this thing.  We keep it in our laundry room so that when we come in from the garage we can immediately take our shoes off and not wear shoes to the rest of the house.  I tried to purge some shoes but only got rid of three pairs this time.

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Gray & Pink

I thought I would take advantage of the time that I’m not working in the corporate world to do something fun with my hair.  Something that would reflect me.  So I went pink!  I also decided to NOT color my salt & pepper roots anymore for now.  I don’t care that people know that a middle-aged woman has some gray hair, LOL.  I am tired of covering the gray that I do have.  I feel fine about them and see no reason to hide them for now.  But I also know that I wanted to have some fun with my hair, so I asked my hairstylist Mel at Ahura Salon to add in the pink. 

The pink was actually like two or three pink colors mixed in there.  One of them glows under black light!  Here’s the before and after of the back.

She actually had to lighten strands of my hair first in order for the pink to really show.  So the pink will fade eventually to a strawberry blonde color.  I got a little bit of length taken off, and more layers put in.

And since I am working out every day, and it’s still summer, I have my hair in a ponytail quite a bit.  So I asked Mel to put in some pink strands on the underside of my hair so that they would show when I put my hair up.

I’m very pleased with how it turned out.  When my hair is mostly gray or all gray, I’ll be able to have rainbow hair without having to strip color off first!  Something to look forward to! 

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