It’s not that there aren’t any reasons for me to revert to my default mode of grouchy crankiness, it’s that somehow I’m fully capable of ignoring those reasons, at least today. The resulting mood is an alien sensation, something I presume is my own filtered version of contentment and joy. And like the countering forces, there is an air of mystery around the happiness catalysts: I can identify them, but I can’t describe why they seem to matter more today than usual.

Whatever the case, I thought I’d mix it up around here and give you a few thoughts of a positive and uplifting nature. Or as near as I come.

• I love the Fruit Guys. They deliver a variety of fruit to businesses sort of as a healthy alternative for companies that like to provide snacks to employees. What I like is that they branch out beyond the typical apples and bananas and include blueberries, grapes, pears, peaches, apricots and so on (depending on what’s in season). They happen to get our shipment here on the same day that they usually bring in bagels so Monday mornings I typically have a tasty (and free!) breakfast of blueberry bagel, piece of fruit and a glass of milk. There’s usually enough fruit left to compliment lunch, too. Today my breakfast peach and my lunch pear were both delicious.
• Nik and I got new phones on Saturday. Originally we had different models, but the Samsung I went with wasn’t working out for me (and it was $20 more than the LG VX9900 phone Nik got) so Nik took it back for me and got another one like hers (only in olive green rather than silver). Our biggest desire was to have a full QWERTY keypad since we’ve gotten into the habit of using text messages about 75% of the time, so we have that plus we got the full unlimited data package which allows us to hook our email into the phones as well. I know I was pretty psyched about the RAZR when it was new and that eventually wore off, which I’m sure will happen again with this phone, but the prices were right and we got good service from Verizon (a marked difference from AT&T, our original provider, who basically told us flat out that they didn’t care one way or the other if we stayed with them). For the moment, I’m happy with my phone.
• I’ve been working on an interesting project at work, which is a very nice change of pace since I get to create something and watch my work unfold rather than just respond. Normally when I have “work to do” it means there is something broken, so I had almost forgotten what it was like to feel satisfied with something I was doing. Unfortunately my skills have been stretched close to their limits trying to make this work and I decided to use an unfamiliar tool at a critical juncture which is causing me some problems. Still, these problems are of my own design and I can tell that resolving the issues will be even more satisfying so I’m happy to work on it, unlike most problems I address which result in a sort of shrug and a “Well, that probably worked. Let’s wait and see if it breaks again.”
• I may have to work today, but at least bank holidays mean far less traffic on the commute trail which is always a nice change. And I like this holiday a lot: It’s nice to have a day set aside to honor someone legitimately worthy. I don’t always understand why we set aside New Year’s Day and Columbus Day as holidays, but for MLK ‘s birthday, I understand completely.
• Our house was a horrible mess on Saturday night and I had promised Nik on Friday that I’d clean the whole thing. Then we ended up spending hours and hours shopping (mostly for the phones) all afternoon and I wasn’t looking forward to spending my last night before “Monday” cleaning. Then without fanfare or anything Nik stepped in and we knocked the whole thing out in about an hour together. Now the place is all nice and clean and it wasn’t an egregious hassle either.
• I caught up on some of the email replies I’d let slip over the last couple of weeks this morning. I don’t know why I let things like that go; I always feel guilty about it and I don’t have any negative connotation with composing email correspondence so there’s no reason for my procrastination. Plus I hate seeing a relatively empty inbox and knowing it’s my own fault. Today I feel like the ball is in other folks’ court, so I’m content.
• So one negative thing that I’m going to spin as a positive is that I discovered that among the other flaky behavior with my old phone over the last few months, it would arbitrarily decide not to alert me about new messages or grant me access to my voicemail. It was inconsistent; enough that I probably lost several messages and or never got others but not enough that I was fully clear on the extent of the problem. If you tried to call and left a message sometime in the last several months but I didn’t get back to you, I’m sorry. I’d blame the phone but honestly if I were better about keeping it with me and on I’d probably have answered a few times and avoided the situation entirely. Plus I knew the phone was garbage and kept using it anyway. But in either case, I believe my new phone works as advertised so if you care to try again, I’d appreciate the second chance.
• Someone stop me before it gets all cheerful in here.

I discovered this wonderful statistics-gathering Perl script via the equally excellent Rands in Repose blog. It gathers data about your Twitter activity for general analysis which is incredibly geeky but, to one such as myself, also fantastically cool.

Since Twitter is rapidly becoming my preferred method of remote communication, I simply had to try this out. Unfortunately the default script package was designed to use Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet software which I don’t own so I used the variant script found in the comments for the original script post to use Google instead and came up with the following:

Tweets per hour

Tweets per day

Tweets per month

So some of the data is a little strange-looking primarily because up through August I was working a grave shift and since as you can see from the daily chart I do most of my Twittering during work hours, I have some activity in the wee hours of the morning. However, I’ve begun Twittering much more earnestly in the last couple of months, mostly due to me finally convincing several friends to join, which means the activity seems heavily weighted toward the regular daylight hours.

You’ll note a fairly fitful start at the beginning of the year. I’ve noticed that there seems to be kind of an adjustment period when people first get on the site: You update for a few days, forget about it for a week or so, remember again and make a single update and so on. Until at last there comes this sort of moment of clarity where you either get the critical mass of friends and acquaintances involved enough that it becomes a real means of communication (as opposed to an interesting toy) or you become so enamored with the idea of following the activities of other people in tiny bite-sized morsels delivered throughout the day that it just “sticks.” You’ll note that October was the moment of clarity for me and the dip in November was a sad side effect of me being dumb and forgetting that I can update from my phone while we were in Seattle visiting Fast-Track.

Incidentally, it would have been awesome to have Twittered from Seattle and I sincerely regret my lapse; I lamented the oversight on Twitter hours after we got back.

The script also tracks the ‘@reply’ usage as well, but since it took me the better part of the year to get anyone on the site that I know well enough to reply to, my stats in that category are dull and unimpressive (hence the omission). It’s also misleading because I’ve noticed that with Nik I tend to use direct messages (‘d DixieGirl’ for example) when I need to speak to her directly versus ‘@DixieGirl’ which everyone can see. However I tend to have semi-public conversations with Ryan so my top ‘@reply’ listing is @corvock even though I communicate with Nik via Twitter at least 3-to-1 compared with Ryan. But obviously these stats can’t collect info on the direct messages which aren’t publicly visible (that’s sort of the point).

What I find most interesting about all this is how it took Twitter to really make me see the benefit of text messaging, but because of it I now have a pretty steady stream of messages coming into (and out of) my phone. For sanity’s sake and also for the sake of my cell phone bill I’ve had to limit the people who’s tweets update directly on my phone to Nik and Scott, but I sincerely regret not being hip to what’s happening with Red, Gin, Whimsy, Lister, Ryan and the rest simply because I can’t afford to have 25 messages per day.

However, with Twitter facilitating so much of my daily communication now and with discoveries like the sublime Oh, Don’t Forget, I may have to simply call AT&T and crank up my text message plan to the next level and just be done with it.