Five Things Making Me Happy (Can a state have an official smell? / a lost sheep)

Hello,

Valentine’s Day was this week. One of our family traditions is that instead of sending holiday cards in December, when life is so hectic, we send them for Valentine’s Day. Also, I frame each year’s card and add it to our collection of Valentine’s Day photographs. Every February, I display these photos for just a few weeks, so we never take them for granted. It’s always fun to arrange the pictures and see how my daughters have changed over the years.

But this year, I forgot! I was so busy getting the cards in the mail by February 14—and then feeling smug about the fact that I’d done it—that I didn’t give a thought to the Valentine’s gallery until this morning. Arrrgh! I decided to put the photos on display anyway. Better late than never.

Onward,

5 Things Making Me Happy

The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl this week! It was such a happy day for Kansas City. I wish I were in my hometown to feel the celebratory mood.

As an enthusiast for the sense of smell, I was delighted to hear of an effort to adopt “the aroma of green chile roasting in the fall” as the official state smell of New Mexico. Do other states have an official smell? I’m trying to imagine what could be the official smell for Missouri or New York. For Kansas City, I’d choose barbecue, and for New York City, I’d choose the smell of the subway, but I don’t know what smell could evoke an entire state.

More Kansas City! One fun thing about having a sister who is a TV writer is that from time to time, I’ll spot some kind of inside joke or reference in a story. Recently, when I was watching episode 5 of Fantasy Island, I got a big thrill when three siblings look with wonder around a room and one says, “It’s our rec room from our house on Stratford Road!” Our family lived on Stratford Road for about a decade. (We didn’t have a rec room however.)

As a podcast creator and a podcast listener, I was curious to know: What are people doing while they listen to podcasts? Are they commuting, exercising, eating, working, or what? Research shows that, for Americans, the most common activity is … doing household chores. I sure do. Listening to a great podcast is a terrific way to make chores less onerous. And it can be a great way to use the “Strategy of Pairing”—when you allow yourself to listen to a favorite podcast only when you’re doing something that you might otherwise want to avoid. It makes me happy to think people may be using Happier to help them get through boring tasks.

I was fascinated by this little video of a sheep. He was lost in the forest for years and, when found, was covered in eighty pounds of wool. He could barely move. It was so satisfying to see him emerge from the burden of all that fleece.