A hand-made card shows that you took the time to do something special for your loved one. Let me repeat that with the right emphasis: A hand-made card shows that YOU took the time to do something special for your loved one.

You wouldn’t outsource your hugs. You wouldn’t outsource your hand shakes. You wouldn’t outsource your kisses or your smiles or your phone calls. Don’t outsource your greeting cards to some factory somewhere. Make your own and show that they really do come from the heart.  From your heart.

Taken from today’s Daily Dose of Happiness

Not just a big LOL moment, but words of extreme wisdom. If you are feeling bored, it is because you are not giving yourself a challenge. It’s time to decide how best to unbore yourself. Nobody but you can stop boring you.

Taken from today’s edition of Daily Dose of Happiness newslleter 

The most obvious is to stop spending so much time in front of a screen. OK, not always practical.

So get up during commercials or every half hour and stretch.

In fact, get up and do some aerobic exercise, even just for 30 seconds. Jumping jacks. Dance. Fast-paced push-ups. Skip rope. Anything.

Every few minutes move your eyes away from the screen. Roll your eyes up, to the left, to the right, but most importantly, focus them on something closer and also on something farther than the screen.

Force a yawn. Stretching your face will boost that energy and reduce that stress.

Energize!

This app is at http://apps.facebook.com/threegoodthings/, but the page with  more info is at http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=119352832576&v=info
. It is free to use, but because it is research, they ask participants  to complete very brief surveys after 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, and 6  months of use.

This could be a great way to spread your own happiness. 

But every single lawn is perfectly manicured. All I can wonder is , “Doesn’t anybody here have anything else to do? Does lawn manicuring hold such a high priority in their lives that, with all the competing pressures of modern life, they somehow all find the time to pay this much attention to grass?”

Then one of the neighbors comes out and starts pushing her lawn mower across an already low-cut lawn, somehow managing to cut it even lower. This is a lady with children. Is it just me, or is a huge section of society misplacing their priorities? Remember, your priorities are not what you say they are, but rather how you spend your life.

How do you spend your life? What are your priorities?

“Aw, dad, I know you mean well, and I know I’m not really doing you proud, but I like to party. I’ll get on the right track some day. I don’t need to worry.”

They drove a little further, when suddenly the son said, “Hey dad, that was the turnoff for the cottage. You missed the turnoff.”

“I know,” said the father. “I think I’ll just keep driving this way for a while. I can always go back later to take the right road.”

A few more minutes – and a couple turnoffs – passed. The son began to think of the swimming he would miss if they arrived too late. “Dad, the farther you go down this road, the longer it will take to get back.”

The father replied, “That’s true. The further you go down the wrong track, the harder it is to get back. So when were you thinking of turning your life around to head down the right track?”

Where do you want to go? What do you want out of life? Most importantly, what are you waiting for?

Yehu operates in conjunction with Choice Humanitarian, an international NGO specializing in village development. It was created based on the principles and procedures of the world-renowned Grameen Bank.

Yehu Microfinance works with BasaBody and Coast Coconut Farms to empower poor rural entrepreneurs in Kenya to help create a sustainable living for themselves. This is done through enhanced accessibility to sustainable financial services, business opportunities, and skills training.  In other words, we are not giving them fish; we are giving them fishing rods so that they can catch their own fish.  This is the part I really like.  From a “happiness” perspective, we are helping people both materially and psychologically, by giving them the means to create a worthwhile life for themselves.

Please contribute:

Parenting is pure happiness.
Full of mumminess and pappiness
You jump for joy
When you hear “It’s a boy”
And the room is filled with clappiness

Feel free to add your own limericks to complete the story.  Let’s see how creative you can be.  After all, what follows are sleepless nights, first steps, birthday parties, ballet lessons and hockey games.. 

Miguel de Unamuno makes us think a bit about our natural self-righteousness. We tend to think that our visions are “truth”.

Truth is that when a rock hits your head, the skull cracks open. Vision is that hitting a rock against a head is wrong, because it is killing.

Yes, read that again. That is vision, not truth. In fact, most people accept that killing is right in some instances. Such as killing fellow creatures to eat them. Or killing tyrants who torture or kill others. We kill in war and sometimes as punishment. Some people agree with these actions; some disagree. That is because people have different visions.

We don’t have to agree with other people’s visions, but if we want to get along without a whole lot more killing, it sure would help if we respected other people’s visions a little more than we do now.