Today I am very full of happy. At home, a batch of this corn and sausage chowder is cooking in my slow-cooker. The ingredients looked pretty good, and I bet the final result will be even better. I'm going to make another attempt at procuring locally baked bread from the Mill Creek Cafe on my way home to accompany said chowder. We had breakfast there on the weekend and I was over the moon about their whole-wheat bread. Thus far I haven't been able to buy any (although they do sell it by the loaf) because on the earlier nights in the week they close at 5. But tonight! Tonight is bread-night! The night I finally get my bread!

On Tuesday night, I finished the latest of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint Germain books (A Dangerous Climate), which was good but also quite long and wordy and the pacing was a bit weird, and I needed something interesting and meaty and easy to read. Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember was exactly what I was looking for, even if I could not have quite articulated why I was looking for it. I finished it in less than 24 hours, and ran to Chapters on my lunch break yesterday to pick up the second and third books in the series. I'm about 100 pages into The People of Sparks (book 2) and it's got quite a different feeling, but I'm enjoying it also. I could not get over how great City of Ember was--both simple and sophisticated, post-apocalyptic without being too dreary, full of very simple but very effective metaphor. The ideas in it will be familiar to anyone who's read other children's books, but that somehow makes it richer instead of boring, which is one of the signs of a great book, in my opinion. You should read it, Internet, but have book 2 ready before you finish it because if you don't you'll just resent me.

At Shopper's Drug Mart yesterday they had these very simple canvas messenger bags on sale for less than $10. I bought one and I'm going back today to get at least one more. James and I are dicsussing all the nerdy ways we can craft them up. He wants "FTW" on his. I'm thinking of print-screening pictures of some iconic-designer chairs (Eames, etc) on mine. I have lots of other crafty things I'm thinking about too, although no means to actually do them yet as all my stuff is still packed. Plus most of them are secret secret things related to secrets that I am not allowed to talk about, and I don't know why I even mentioned it. Forget it! Forget about the secrets!

Other, more minor but still significant sources of happiness: my new computer, which is all set up and running (quietly, but powerfully) at home; the giant external hard drive James' and my home computers share, and the fact that I make James perform all tasks related to it because he is our network administrator; Etsy, and pretty cherry-blossom jewelry purchased therefrom; work--specifically my ability to find a broken link, fix it, and then go back and check it and it works. No one else even knows that this process has happened, and no one cares. Autonomy! As well, I have successfully completed the tasks on a number of little pieces of paper, and now I get the satisfaction of recycling said pieces of paper. What a day this is.