good news

Yes! Score one for Ashley.  It’s official, my brother is engaged to the coolest chic, which now fulfills my life-long yearning for a sister.  Last night the families celebrated and told funny stories about the bride and groom to be (I should be tame, that could come back to bite me in the rear).

There’s an endless list of things I love about Valerie, but I’ll just highlight one that is the most painfully obvious to me: I no longer will be the only tall woman in the family.  We probably even have the same impossible-to-shop-for-inseam.  Yeah, I know it’s a shallow observation, but give the 6′ tall girl a break.

YEA!  Go Paul!  I’m so excited for them.

If I worked on this mayor’s staff, I so would nominate myself to be the fake maid of honor.  I could give one stellar bogus toast.

I shower 2-3 times a day in the winter because I can never get warm and my winter PJs consist of ski-ready-like layers.  For these reasons, and so many more, I literally squeal with uncontrolable excitment when I see the sight of above for the first time of the year.  The 09 sighting occured outside my mom’s condo (obviously at night) as I was returning a borrowed dress.  One of her neighbors pulled into the parking lot as I was kneeling in the mulch documenting the little sprouts that could.  Yeah, he will always think of me as the “crazy lady with the camera in the dirt.” Eh, he just doesn’t get it.

For the second time in a month, I have read about research that measures the effect peoples’ mood have on others. Apparently, a happy person’s joy tends to have far more of a lasting impact than someone’s funk. I first read about this in the Tipping Point. Author Malcolm Gladwell (fitting last name huh?) cited research that showed happiness trumps sadness in terms of its “stickiness factor,” or ability to have an impact that is staying and will influence behavior. Sadness on the other hand, does not really stick.

Then this morning, a friend sent me a link to a Live Science article, which further verifies the power of contagious happiness. The article states,

The researchers analyzed data compiled from nearly 5,000 interconnected people over a 20-year period. After establishing a baseline mood for each participant, the team found that when one person became happier, it rippled through the network, increasing the likelihood that others would become happier too.

So don’t waste your time looking for people to wallow in your sadness with you; apparently they aren’t likely adapt to your mood. Feeling down? Go hang out with people who have smiles on their faces; they’ll bring you up a few notches on the mood meter AND it should stick. It definitely worked for me when I was hanging out with teens (like the girl above) at a recent Youth Alive retreat. I’m sure without even being aware of it, I was smiling just looking at this girl while taking her photo.