I woke up this morning in such a good mood. Cheerful, optimistic, ready to take charge of my day. Doing some stretching before I even got out of bed, grateful for the coziness of my space, charmed by my delightful dog. Just your basic happy morning mood.

In the spirit of my choosing happiness program, I knew that a few factors were influencing me.

1. I initially woke up at 5, decided it was too early, and successfully went back to sleep until just after 7. Two extra hours of sleep is a full extra sleep cycle — time enough to have some good REM sleep and maybe even some deep sleep — and that’s enough to make anyone feel good.
2. The weather has cooled down enough that I’m back on my Big Bowl of Possibilities breakfast meal plan (aka lots of sautéed vegetables), plus still sticking to my Salads+ summer menu, so the past few days have been rich with nutrition. Yesterday also included both chicken and hard-boiled eggs, so a lot of protein, too. I’ve also added sardines to my diet for the sake of the B12, which is an essential ingredient in the production of serotonin and dopamine, therefore a “feel-good” nutrient. (And one that many gluten-free eaters don’t get enough of.) The feel-good neurotransmitters are built with feel-good nutrients, and I’ve had plenty lately. It’s not surprising that I feel good.
3. Anticipation… I have so many nice things that I’m looking forward to right now. I’ve got the usual things going on, of course — writing time with friends, the farmer’s market on the weekend, hanging out on the patio of Celery City, spending time outside with Sophie in beautiful places. But my Disney pass is expiring in November and I’m not going to renew it (at least not right away), so I’m also planning a final set of theme park binging: Animal Kingdom next week, the Epcot Food & Wine Festival at the end of the month, maybe a solo short Magic Kingdom trip in between to say good-bye to Tom Sawyer’s Island. And the BBE is visiting next week, so I’m looking forward to that, too. I have found surprisingly little research-backed evidence for my deep belief that anticipation is a key ingredient in happiness, but my belief hasn’t wavered: expecting good things to happen and looking forward to them is part of being happy for me.

So in my happy mood, I get up, get dressed, and take Sophie for a walk. We are only a few houses down the street when Toby, the Australian Shepherd who lives on the corner, comes running out to greet us. I drop Sophie’s leash so she can play with Toby, which she happily does. Toby’s mom, Hannah, is putting her little one in the car, and calling Toby, who is not supposed to leave his yard, but Toby is ignoring her. So I walk over to Hannah’s car, Toby following me, and chat with Hannah.

Sophie pauses for a pee.

Alas, Sophie’s leash is not being held in my hand, as it should be, safely off the ground. Sophie’s leash is underneath her, and yes, she pees on it. Copiously. Ugh!

But it’s probably fine, right? It’s gonna be damp in the middle, but it’s not like I run the leash through my hands as we walk. As long as the loop on the end, where I hold it, is dry, what difference does it make?

The loop on the end is not dry. I am immediately faced with a dilemma. Do we go home so I can wash my hands right away and get one of Sophie’s other leashes? But Sophie is eager to go for her walk and I don’t want to get sidetracked and miss out on our early morning sunshine and cool temps, so I decide I will just finish the walk. Carefully. Not touching anything with my dog-pee hands.

We continue walking, around the corner, and down the sidewalk and between two trees and right into an enormous spider web. And I have the exact reaction that one would expect of a person who’s just walked into an ENORMOUS spider web — frantically wiping it off my hair and my face and my shirt and my arms, and OMG, yuck, yuck, and more YUCK.

I am simultaneously wiping off spider web and wiping on dog pee.

I am revolted and as I do my “get off me, get off me!” spider-web removal dance, I think, “This is not the day I was intending to have.”

Except… it still is. Sophie and I finished our walk. She got to say hi to Jack, a little gray terrier, while I chatted with his person, Armand. I got to say hi to Debbie, who didn’t have her dachshund, Ariel, with her today. We both got to say hi to Lisa and Lotara, a pittie mix puppy. We enjoyed the sunshine and the movement and the sense of freedom, and while I was quite aware that I could smell the dog pee on my skin, I also knew that I could get home and have an immediate shower with clean, hot running water in a bathroom with no bugs. (Campground bathrooms always have bugs, it’s just a fact of life in campgrounds.)

This past week, I went to the beach with Christina and a friend of hers, and somewhere along the way we got to talking about luck. I said that I didn’t really believe in luck, and I don’t, in the context of what we were talking about then. That conversation was about choices with bad outcomes. Yeah, that happens. A choice that seems okay can turn out to be really, really wrong. If I had chosen to go home and wash my hands and get a different leash, I might have missed that spider web entirely. Some other unlucky person might have walked through it before I made it back there. But if that had happened, we would have missed greeting all those people and dogs, too, and feeling like part of a community is one of the best happiness boosters there is. Maybe not quite as good as the WIN (Walk-In-Nature), but the WIN plus the community? A++. I mean I guess I could have had all the community and the WIN without the dog pee and the spider web, but I don’t feel unlucky. If anything, that spider web made me more aware of how much I am grateful for all the goodness in my life right now.

Other quick things I want to remember from the past, ouch, three weeks without blogging:

Live music, The Ordinary Boys, at a local bar on a Sunday afternoon, so much fun. In a really weird coincidence, while I was listening to the music and watching people dance, I was thinking about what it would take to make a dance floor feel like a safe space for me and whether it was even possible. At the end of that exact song, the lead singer took a minute to say that one of the things the band stood for was creating a safe space for everyone to have fun, no matter what you wore, your skin color, who you were going home with, their music was for everyone, and he loved that their audiences understood that, too. Such an odd coincidence! The dance floor was still too crowded for me, but maybe someday soon, I’ll dance. Maybe.

The All-The-Birthdays dinner at Space220. I think I’ll remember the circumstances, the magical “luck” of getting a perfect reservation at a restaurant fully booked for months in advance, but I’ll probably forget the food. It was fun, though.

An overnight dog-sitting for Riker. He and Sophie are so adorable together. So much chewing on one another’s faces! This photo, where they are curled up together, (the brown is Riker) was taken a split second before Sophie tried chewing on his ear. You can see why she couldn’t resist.

Going to the Fall Into Fantasy Book Fair from Spellbound Books, held at Tuffy’s, and running into two women from the Spellbound Writer’s Group. I really need to start promoting my writing more seriously again, because I should have had a table at the fair, not just been a guest, but I loved casually running into people I knew. And really, there are so many indie writers here.

And speaking of writing — I have notes, dictated while walking, that need to get transcribed today, plus some breakfast to eat, plus a Japanese lesson or three to do, and somehow my quick blog post, just to write about spider webs and dog pee, has taken me far more time than I intended. Time to get the rest of the day moving!