How to turn around a bad day

Bad days happen to the best of us. Days where you just wake up in a really bad mood. Where something (or nothing) has made you angry, sad, frustrated, disappointed, whatever. Days where you know up front that “MAN, this is going to suck”.

You still have to get up and go to work, but before you even get there, you’re already seething inside. You try to do your job but somehow all the angry, dissatisfied clients have conspired to call you and complain on the same day – though you have no idea how they coordinated that little feat.

Everything your co-workers say to you sounds incredibly stupid. Everyone seems out to annoy you. The next person to open his mouth is likely to get his head ripped clean off.

Not much fun, huh? Luckily, you can do something about it. Here are six ways to turn around a bad day.

I’ve come to appreciate a lot of the stuff that the “Chief Happiness Officer” writes about over the past few months. This is a particularly good example.

I’m almost positive I’ve seen all of these clips before. But that doesn’t stop them from being totally hilarious, even if you are a dog person ;-)

Am I the only person who finds that Cingular TV commercial disturbing? You know, the one with the chef who is complaining about dropped calls?

I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one. But every time I see that commercial, the only thing that really registers is … “angry man with knife”, and it makes me want to run away or change the channel or something. Probably not what Cingular had in mind…

Watching some TV tonight, I was reminded about a weird problem I used to have…

In my previous home, a nice townhouse in the inner city of Calgary, I had a weird static electricity problem. By weird, I mean that no one and I mean no one, would ever believe me when I told them about it. Thankfully, one day after my husband (then boyfriend) moved in, it happened to him as well, so at least one person believed me.

So, here’s the scoop. The living room/dining room floor was covered in carpet. Nothing strange, just builder grade pile carpet. The couch was placed under the front window, about as far away from the kitchen as you could get. In the winter (which is very dry in Calgary), I could get significant static build-up as I walked across the living room from the couch toward the kitchen. The fun part would happen as I crossed over from the carpet to the linoleum in the kitchen. Occasionally, my foot would land directly on the metal threshold strip. ZAP! There was a truely impressive spark/shock generated when this happened. But that’s not all that happened (or else it wouldn’t be weird, would it?). As I was exclaiming “Yikes!” from the shock, I noticed that the TV muted simultaneously. Kinda weird, but it gets weirder still. In addition to the TV muting, the motion sensor light on my back deck would light up.

To recap… static zap.. TV mute.. motion sensor light turns on. Weird, eh? If this happened once, or twice, I would have forgotten about it. But it was REPEATABLE. As long as I could generate static on that carpet, I could make the TV mute and the motion sensor light go on. And so could my husband.

There must have been some really interesting electrical wiring in that place.

Dog Letters to God

Dear God, When we get to Heaven, can we sit on your couch? Or is it the same old story?

I can’t seem to find a link to the PPS version of this, so I’ll post it. It is a very cute slideshow for dog lovers. But that’s not the point.

I find it highly entertaining that this PowerPoint file actually hangs my Intel iMac when opened with Microsoft PowerPoint. And it looks like crap in Keynote, with lots of text cut off. But when I got home to my NeoOfficeJ on my PowerBook G4, it works perfectly…

Please, please, get NeoOffice working on the Intel Macs soon.

My husband always jokes about hardly being able to wait until he can sit out on the front porch, and start yelling, “Hey you kids! Get offa my lawn!” I can already hear him spouting this quote to his niece and nephews…

Random Thoughts From My Brain:

You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled. You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980’s!

http://www.ernestcline.com/spokenword/

Birds Die From Flying ‘Drunk’ Into Windows – Yahoo! News

The birds — whose remains were carefully examined to ensure they were not victims of avian influenza — had livers so diseased “they looked like they were chronic alcoholics,” Sonja Wehsely, a spokeswoman for Vienna’s veterinary authority, told Austrian television Thursday.

Ok, this one caught my attention because I remember my mom’s “drunk tank” for the cedar waxwings that used to haunt the front yard of our house when we had an ornamental crab apple tree in the front yard. In winter, the birds would gorge on the rotting, fermenting apples, and then proceed to fly drunkenly into the living room window.

An associate of mine came up with this link for me. Another instance of real life being way funnier than fiction. So, why blog about it? Well, I used to suffer from the affliction mentioned…

A novel method for the removal of ear cerumen - Keegan and Bannister 173 (12): 1496 - Canadian Medical Association Journal

We describe the off-label use of a recreational device (the Super Soaker Max-D 5000) in the alleviation of a socially emergent ear condition.