Delectable Tidbits

Thinking about the things that make you happy will make you happy. It’s true. Every once in awhile it is good to take an assessment of what makes you happy. Just thinking about it will make you smile. Seeing a list reminds you of what a wonderful, interesting, beautiful and compassionate person you are and it will remind you that you have the ability to see joy and wonder in the world.

Personally, I have a tendency to look at the glass as half empty instead of half full. It is hard for me to say kind things to myself. It is hard for me to appreciate the good things in the world. I’ve been working on this a lot lately. I want to improve myself. I want to be the kind of person who sees the good things before picking out all of the bad things. I was so happy when I got an email from Jeanne at Simple Math Bakery. She gave me the Happy 101 award (above). Jeanne and I found each other on YeastSpotting a few weeks ago and I’ve really enjoyed reading her blog, she cooks and bakes the kind of things I like to cook and bake. Now I know that she’s been reading my blog too and that makes me very happy, indeed! What made me even more happy about this award is the opportunity to share the things I love with all of you.

1. The backyard bunny: I used to own a pet bunny and he was one of my favorite pets. He was great to snuggle with and all I had to do if I was sad was to watch his antics and I would instantly become happy. I miss my bunny. A few months ago a wild bunny adopted our yard. Whenever one of us see’s him, we yell “Bunny siting!!”. He is shy and once he sees us he runs away, but he makes me so happy just to see him bouncing around the yard.

2. Observing wildlife: I get such a thrill from seeing animals in the wild. It can be something as simple as seeing birds playing or as exotic as seals in the ocean. Last week we were walking by a lake and we saw a dozen photographers staring at a spot near the shore. Nothing was there. On our way back, we saw what they were waiting for, a pair of Bobcats! They were strolling by like nobody was watching them. I got such a thrill from seeing them so close and wished I brought my camera.

                                          Photo courtesy of 123rf.com

3. Dogs and Cats: I don’t own any, but just seeing a dog makes me so happy. Dogs are almost always happy and it is contagious. Cats aren’t necessarily always happy, but they are so cool that I get great joy just from observing them, I get greater joy when they are friendly and let me pet them.

4. Lost: My favorite show is coming back in a couple of weeks for it’s last season. We are watching the first five seasons in anticipation of the finale. I am having so much fun!

5. Strange plants: I love plants. The stranger the plant the better. I have collected ugly and strange orchids. Some are beautiful in their other worldly oddness. I love succulents and cacti. I created a fish tank that was choked full of odd plants, making it difficult to keep fish.

6. Walking: My favorite form of exercise. It exercises the mind as well as the body. I love that my body can take me places. I love that I can walk for hours on end. I’d rather hike up a hill than do any other form of exercise.

7. The ocean: I’ve lived by the coast most of my life and the ocean never ceases to amaze me. I love to stare at it. I love to swim in it. I love to snorkel under it. I love to travel up the coast and see how it changes. I love to travel to other parts of the ocean to see it from other perspectives. It is a thing of beauty.

8. Exploring museums and historic sites: I love to visit museums that were once people’s homes like the Casa del Herrero or Lotusland or Hearst Castle or The Huntington Gardens. Not only is it a great experience but I love to imagine what it was like to live in another era.

9. Baking: I love to cook, but even more, I love to bake. The aromas that fill the house when something is baked are precious. The taste and texture of fresh baked goods are wonderful. The sense of accomplishment… to say I made that and see the look of appreciation when I can share the food with someone. It makes me more than happy!

10. Blogging: This is my big creative outlet. I feel like an artist when I contribute to my blog. I am a writer and nobody can criticize my writing and tell me that I am not worthy of being published. I am a photographer. I am a designer. I am a chef. I am a baker. I am confident. I am also incognito. Most of you don’t really know who I am so I can say whatever I like. All of these things make me incredibly happy. The fact that there are people out there who actually enjoy reading my blog, well… that makes me even happier. The friendship and positive feedback are wonderful and I love having people come and spend their time with me. It makes me feel loved. Thank you.

This award is meant to be shared with other Bloggers who make you happy. I’m not big on Memes and chain letters so I just want to say that the people listed below are under no obligation to play this game. I hope you’ll display the award in your sidebars because you deserve it, I go to your blogs weekly if not daily and your posts always make me happy.

If you do want to pass the award on:

List 10 things that make you happy (remember, it is good for your soul). List 10 Bloggers who brighten your day and link to them. Link back to the original person who gave you the award.

These are the Bloggers who brighten my day. Visit their sites to see why they make me so happy:

1. Nick at Macheesmo: I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, reading his blog is like visting with a friend. He cooks and writes every day!

2. Carolyn at the 1940’s Experiment: The adventures of a woman who is losing weight by eating 1940’s rations. If the concept weren’t interesting enough, I go there just to smile at Carolyn’s lovely sense of humor.

3. Ronnie at Racoon and Lobster: Golden Retriever’s balancing things on their heads. Day trips to exotic local digs. Shoes. Oh yeah… and cooking.

4. John at The lost world of DrFugawe: Interesting factoids, recipes from vintage cookbooks and plenty of baking, fermenting, gardening and canning.

5. Andreas at Delta Kitchen: How can I not love a man who bakes bread with seaweed in it?

6. Cookiecrumb at I’m mad and I eat: One of the first blogs I ever read. No recipes but I am always enthralled by what she eats and cooks. She also has a super cute dog.

7. Natashya at Living in the Kitchen with Puppies: Such a gorgeous blog. Such mouth-watering food. All from a wonderful person with a terrific writing voice.

8. Garrett at Vanilla Garlic: I just love to read his writing. He cooks wonderful things and they always get chewed on by the Eat Beast.

9. Dylan at Sourdough Monkey Wrangler: You gotta love a guy who can turn anything into alcoholic beverages or bread.

10. Susan at Wild Yeast: Baker extraordinaire and Hostess of YeastSpotting. There is always something on her blog to inspire me to keep baking.

Let’s be distracted together. 

I have been trying really hard to make virtual friends in the Blogosphere but the idea of jumping in and playing with my new friends and potential new friends has been a little intimidating.  Joining in on blogging events, you know, the ones where you do something like bake a treat each month was too much commitment for me.  I’m a little bit of a commitment-o-phobe.  I have been dreading that little thing called a Meme since I first discovered blogging.  It’s not that I don’t like to share things about my personal life; it’s just that I like to share what I want to share.

But I need a distraction from my problems.

Dylan from Sourdough Monkey Wrangler is my best blogging friend so far.  We have a shared love of goopy, gloppy, fermented things.  Dylan must have sensed something was up here at Delectable Tidbits when he didn’t see me posting as frequently as usual and he decided to tag me with my first Meme.  How can I say no to Dylan?  But wowsa!  What a Meme this is!  I needed to come up with 5 sordid facts about myself.  OK.  Deep breath.  Here goes.  Distraction is a good thing.  Distraction is a good thing…

First the rules:

1. Link to your Tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself.
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names, linking to them.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs. And now without any further interruptions, 5 sordid facts about Mimi 

1. I am debilitatingly shy.  If I don’t know you, I won’t have much to say to you.  I really want to meet you and have a big exciting intellectual conversation or maybe even just small talk but I can’t help it. I just clam up.  Therefore, I tend to love people who are the opposite of me (as long as they are nice people).  If you are friendly, funny and outgoing enough to talk to anyone you see, I will gladly gravitate towards you.  Unfortunately, you won’t notice me because I am the boring person who keeps annoyingly staring at you while my lower lip quivers as I keep trying to think of something to say to you.  It’s really a shame because I have a decent sense of humor.  People seem to like me if they ever get the chance to talk to me.
2. I hide chocolate.  I don’t know where this behavior comes from but I do!  I hide chocolate!  When my boyfriend and I were first dating, I offered him some of my hidden candy.  If I remember the situation correctly, it was in a bag of candy under my bed.  He thought it was very strange that I would have candy stashed away.  He liked me anyway.  We are still together after a couple of decades.
3. I am an orchid killer.  Not too long ago, I used to be an orchid addict; I owned a couple of thousand dollars worth of really nice plants.  My interest in them completely dissipated.  I was really depressed a few months ago and nearly stopped taking care of them.  Recently, after two weeks of not watering them and then three weeks sitting in a hospital waiting room, more of these orchids than I care to think about are dead.  Here is what they looked like when I loved them.  Don’t tell my estranged friends at the Garden Web orchid forum.  Shhhhhhh!
4. I am a terrible housekeeper.  Even though I love to cook and you would think I would love to feed people, this problem coupled with sordid fact number one keeps me from inviting anyone over.  Ever.
5. I love animals but I tend to dominate them.  When I was a kid, I used to catch things, mostly bugs and reptiles.  I taught my dog to pull me by his neck while I glided along behind him on my skates, I taught him to climb a tree and jump over our fence to escape (he was too lazy to escape on his own, he only did so on command).  I had an Amazon parrot that I taught to lay upside down in my cupped hands (play dead).  I used to make houses out of shoeboxes complete with doors and plastic windows and put my parakeets inside.  They would stare out the windows and chirp at me.  They loved to chew their way out.  My Rabbit would roll balls back and forth to me.  My guppy learned to hang out in my hand and my flounder would do back flips out of his tank and into my hand.  Before you get all PETA on me in the comments.  They all loved me and no animals were actually harmed in the making of this entertainment.

Memes are like chain letters or viruses so let’s pass this one along.  Tag you’re it:

1. I’ll shoot this meme up to Alaska and ask my new friends, the Arctic Carbivores to share some sordid details with us
2. Hey Germany!  Scholli2000, do you have 5 sordid facts for us?  (This blog is in German so here is a link to Google translate if you need it. It doesn’t work very well, but the results can be amusing)
3. I love reading the Diary of a new old-fashioned Gal.  Normally, there’s nothing sordid happening there, just a fun read with good solid writing.  Let’s see what sort of sordid details we can get out of Becca
4. I’ve never seen a meme on Baking with Sourdough Starters but hopefully Teresa will play along with us.
5. Another blog that is the home of a wonderful writer is Baking and Books so I’ll tag Ari as well.