still going on about flickr

i found the coolest greasemonkey flickr script the other day. it's a little widget thingie that reminds me of that linkwithin widget i used to have on my blog (but removed because it was making the loading time really, really slow for some people). when you're looking at a flickr picture, it gives you a visual list of "people who faved this also faved..." and i'm finding the coolest stuff that way! stuff i wouldn't have otherwise found. and expanding my flickr horizons. it's just another of those things that makes me love the big, giant interweb. endless connections, i tell you. and endless goodness.

and around here...endless red velvet cupcakes.

hope your weekend is a good one.

the object(s) of happiness

i'm not sure why i've spent so much time of late thinking about happiness, but the fact is, i have. maybe it's my incessant reading of the curmudgeonly paul theroux (it depends on which one you're reading...his more recent stuff (dark star safari and ghost train) is less curmudgeonly). i'm now reading his happy isles of oceania and he's back to being a curmudgeon. and it has a lot to do with his level of personal happiness and it seems his long-crumbling marriage is in the final stages of crumbling in happy isles.

happiness is affected by so many factors. those people around us--the ones closest, but also the random ones we encounter every day. our jobs. our co-workers. our kids. our pets. the food we eat. our homes. things we create. whether we have time to be creative at all. having enough money. whether we have someone to clean for us. staying in a fabulous hotel. taking a vacation. what we read. how much t.v. we watch. movies we see. do these things make us happy or do we seek out all of these things because we're already happy? it's the chicken and the egg, really, which comes first?

living in this grey, dreary climate, i've found that my camera can contribute greatly to my happiness. there was plenty of sunshine the past two days and i took a lot of pictures. so, today, i can look at this jumble of glass beads in full sunshine and remember how wonderful that sunshine was:

and having the picture can help me through the dreariness. i've written before about the capacity of color to make me happy. and i can see that the things i was drawn to photograph in the sunshine of the past two days were colorful. something about the rays of the sun on bright colors is so cheerful. of course, it helps that this home is filled with bright colors, so there must be something to knowing on an intuitive level that they contribute to my happiness.

maybe all of the gloom and doom that fills the newspapers every day is what has me consciously thinking about happiness and what makes me happy. or maybe it was just the cupcake i had for breakfast...

happy valentine's day!

hope your day is as filled with red velvet cupcakes as ours is!

recipe here.

be sure to use their creamy vanilla frosting recipe as well.

it's heavenly.

blogged the recipe and more pix here.