silveradept | Sunshine Revival/Challenge 2025 #4: Happiness (Reply)

sunshine_revival posted up their fourth topic, even as the heat continues to hammer the Northern Hemisphere, along with humidity, and many of us hide in our climate controlled buildings against it.

We’re heading towards the middle of July, and I hope the weather is treating you kindly this summer, no matter where you are. Any fun plans so far? I’ve spent this week on the mountain, reconnecting with family and staying in a pretty cool house. And talking about houses…

Challenge #4:

Fun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.

Creative: Write from the perspective of a house or other location.

Smiling is my default work persona, but not necessarily the one that I have in my outside-of-work mode. Some of that is that I'm still digging myself out from the consequences of decisions I made that were both necessary and important to my continued existence, but there's also a certain part about my mental makeup and my memories where things that are joyful are ephemeral and filed away in deep space, while things that are upsetting are usually kept dear and close, because hey're ways of cudgeling myself and reminding myself that happiness is a trap and if I'm happy, it's probably because I'm doing something that will eventually result in unhappiness once I remember the thing that I've forgotten or put off in favor of temporary happiness. It's not a good way to run a mental state, but it's something that I've used to keep myself running in adverse situations, and therefore, it's hard to get rid of, especially because the situations that I might need it again are very dependent on how other people react to things, rather than something where I can train myself to react differently to things.

So it takes a higher amount of happy to register with me than it would for others. (And a lower amount of unhappy, but I'm also very good at generating all the unhappy I need to make sure the bad memories stick.) But there are things that I'm happy about, or that I'm looking forward to.

I just spent a week off of work, doing the things that I wanted to do, including getting into one of the games in my Steam list. It's an interesting design of roguelike, bouncing back and forth between runs meant to gather resources to improve things and the occasional run that's needed to actually progress the plot. Progression is gate-locked behind new materials, so you have to open up new areas to get the new resources. That's been interesting to play, even though I'm not happy about the way the controls work. The week of vacation also meant doing some maintenance on the lawnmower, which has been sorely needed, and then knocking down the dandelion stalks with the now more smoothly-running lawnmower. It also meant dishwasher loading and unloading, which is not something that necessarily makes me happy, but having sinks without dishes in them, even for the short time that it's there, provides a boost to mood and a flag to me that suggests that it's okay to do other things like play games, because there aren't any obvious chores screaming to be done.

The vacation week also meant getting pizza and finding out that the stuffed crust pizza doesn't have the structural integrity to handle the toppings that I wanted to have with it. But it was still good pizza, and it got eaten perfectly fine.

And there were people who visited from out of state during vacation, and I got to have a wonderful time with them, with days that didn't require any kind of timeline or even wanted to have an agenda of places to go and things to see. It was restful and restorative to spend that time without agenda or issues.

A bit of happy-making that came in was getting gifted some new games for a console, such that I might be able to unlock a related feature in a different game, because some companies like to gate their things behind entirely different games. So that's nice, and I can't complain about the price.

While there are things about my workplace that are creating Ultimate Grumbles and allusions to rearranging the deck chairs on a White Star Line ship, the people that I work with at my location, and most of the people who come into the location that I interact with are still able to raise my spirits, because I can still help them with the things they need. Just yesterday, I was helping walk someone through the processes of attaching e-mail, printing e-mail attachments, and the like, and it was nice to be working with someone who understood what I was asking, just needed to be told where to point the mouse to get it done. And when they apologized for bothering me, I used my usual line on that, "They pay me to do this, it's not a bother." Which got back a "But I'm being the problem child," and I laughed, and assured them that they were nowhere near the most difficult people that I have deal with. Without examples, of course, but my workplace has seen some shit, and we're one of the places that usually is on the level of "could you plug your headphones in?" rather than "Dude, you're having a bad mental health day, but stop throwing rocks at the windows and breaking them."

I'd call it less happy-making and more a matter of satisfaction, but having learned some basic darning and repair from the sewer in my house, it's been helpful to me, because the socks that I bought that are of proper size for me to wear and contain fun designs and the like are developing holes in the places where they take the most stress of being worn. And they've been work for several years at this point, so holes are expected to appear, clearly. But by being able to fix the holes with thread and darning, I've extended the life of the socks that I have and hopefully will continue to do so until they're irreparable.

And the last thing? I finally figured out why something of mine wasn't working properly, and, as usual, it only took flipping a switch to turn the damn thing on, because somewhere along the way, it had been turned off. Having thrown the switch, it began behaving immediately. So many things in my life, especially in relation to computer touching, often means finding a similar problem online, seeing what the solution was to that, trying it, and then seeing if it works. There are several people in my life that claim this makes me an official computer toucher, because I can do these kinds of things, but I will always look slightly askew at them, but that's because I apparently have a much higher standard of belief in what people can do with their computers, despite working with people who are probably closer to the average person on a daily basis. (I think of programmers as computer-touchers, and those same people who say I'm a computer toucher will point out that by many of their definitions, I also qualify as a programmer, so I can't weasel out of it that easily.) In any case, it's up and running again, and the actual fix took all of five seconds, and all I needed to be was an information professional to figure out what the search query was that produced the right forum article where the right solution presented itself.

More laughs and happiness later!