simplify. (again)

 It's the last day of vacation which started the day after a weekend out of town on business. So it's been two weeks since I really spend much time in the chaos that is our life back home. And whenever I get away from it, I long to hold on to what I experienced away. There's a sense of calmness - even with the entire family in tow - we have less stuff, the Airbnb is always cleaner and more streamlined - we have fewer chores and we just run a load of laundry and dishes every night no matter what. And so in the calm morning today I had a chance to do some reflection and realized it was time to restart simplify. This is my regular attempts to make my life simpler. It usually lasts for awhile and then goes by the wayside. 

So, this is just my latest attempt. Let's see how well it lasts this time. I took quite a while trying to figure out the typeface I wanted and then I just started writing down thoughts and it came out pretty quickly. Over time I'll see if what I wrote down makes sense or if it's nonsense. One thing that came really quickly was that I need a way to quickly identify what's wrong when something's wrong. I wondered about some sort of think like they have in airport bathrooms where you press the frowny face or the smiley face to tell if you think the bathroom is clean. (How clean are those little devices?) I didn't have the patience to find an app to do exactly that, but it did help me realize that I needed some method to stop and evaluate when something's going wrong, before I get angry, anxious, depressed or overwhelmed. And this kind of popped into being: 

So... what made me unhappy today?

My computer wouldn't start. We were on vacation, but we had nothing planned, and it was noisy in the house and when I went out on the deck the sound of the waves were interrupted by people doing construction on a nearby house. I was unhappy. But, this was something I could control. I decided to take a drive. I made an appointment at a Genius Bar in the nearest large city and then I drove my Mac over and they fixed it. (Note: If your Mac won't turn on after a software update and you've just recently had the screen replaced, they can probably fix it for free at your nearest Apple Store by doing a "revive" on it. If you have two Macs with modern OS, you can Google the directions and probably do it yourself.)

They fixed my computer. Unhappiness solved.  

What else? I was a little bummed because we haven't done a whole lot this trip - we didn't really have any programmed events, didn't order food from a local restaurant, didn't really do anything. My wife made a trek to a nearly bookstore that was recommended in her author group earlier this week, and yesterday I had ventured out looking for wild zebras and returned home without any success, but otherwise, we'd pretty much just stayed in and enjoyed food and TV and sitting on the patio listening to the waves. 

I headed back after I got my computer fixed and called ahead to see if anyone wanted to go with my out to try to find zebras again. It turned out everyone did. So we all got in the car, headed up the coast, saw zebras, got a few photos and then the walked into a copse of trees and we never saw them again even though we waited a long time. But, I saw them, and I got my photo. That's what I wanted. (Why zebras? They were part of a rich guy zoo. After he died, they closed the zoo and the zebras were released into the wild. His family still owns an insane amount of land in the area and the climate here is suitable for the zebras, so now they just live on the land, as wild as an animal can be when allowed to roam on an 83,000 acre plot of land.)

We talked about getting food from a local restaurant, but we were pretty tired and not very hungry so we got a small treat from a local shop and then went back to our Airbnb to get everything cleaned and packed up for tomorrow's departure. 

Is happiness the right thing to aim for? What about not-depressed? Or content? Or calm? Or enriched? Or not-bored? Or satisfied? It feels like a good shorthand, especially for the reverse "I'm not happy." So it is what it is for now. We'll just see how long this lasts this time.