What's Making Me Happy: April 18

What a difference a week makes.

Last week was kind of unpleasant, with the dramatic exception of lunch with Suze—the only fuel in my tank, the thing that carried me along until things got better. To reiterate, I had a nasty stomach bug (the second in as many weeks), I deleted my entire iTunes and iPhoto libraries, the battery on my car died in a dark, not-at-home place, and those are only the concrete things that went wrong. Things felt apocalyptic; even my kids were falling apart.

This week was spring break for the kids. They flew out to visit their grandparents (my daughter for a few days, my son for most of the week) and have had a fabulous time. Son is still there having fun. Daughter came home yesterday. She and I went to an acrobatic yoga class last night, something she found out about and encourage me to try with her: it's a partner-based yoga, with a focus on playfulness. Here's a photo of her doing "folded leaf" with a base who wouldn't drop her. (The person on the floor is the "base," the person on top is the "flyer.")

The acroyoga community is incredibly fun-focused, and so supportive. It was a big energy-mood boost. This trend seems to be catching on everywhere, so if you haven't heard of it and are intrigued, Google classes in your city. You don't have to be a yoga expert, you just have to a bit of muscle and a bit of balance. At least, for starters. Eventually, we hope we'll be impressing everyone with poses like these:

That last pose above we could each do, so long as we partnered with someone who knew what they were doing, but we did manage a few poses with each other as well.

Shifting from the sublime to the quotidian: I've been recovering my computer data, which is also making me happy. I did indeed nuke the drive containing my photos and music, and buying a data recovery program got me nowhere. But it turns out a lot of the files were scattered around hidden places. Some I found in a random unnamed folder on my hard drive. Some ended up on an Amazon cloud storage space I never knew I had. Photos I'd uploaded to Shutterfly for gifts and calendars are still there. And Facebook has a huge library of my photos, which I was able to re-import. I am going to be able to retrieve a lot more music than photos in the end, which isn't the balance I'd have asked for (photos are much more precious, obviously), but at the moment I'm just pleased I'm able to get anything back at all. I have a new backup system set up and I strongly encourage everyone else to back up and duplicate all their precious data. Ideally, back it up on an external drive *and* a cloud storage service. Take it from me. You don't want to spend the equivalent of an entire work week extracting a fraction of your files from random places.

While last week I hardly saw my hard-working husband, this week he's been much more available. We even went on a DATE. He took me out to a nice restaurant on Tuesday night, where we enjoyed a long leisurely meal and a glass of wine. We both love to cook and tend to prefer to make our own lovely meals at home rather than pay someone else gobs to do it for us, but damn. It was really nice to have someone prepare food, serve it, and clean up afterward. (The "clean up afterward" is actually kind of huge. I like cooking but hate hate hate cleaning up.) It was also so nice to have some me+him time, just the two of us, nothing to worry about, nothing we're trying to accomplish.

I haven't been online much to find cute/funny things to make you happy, but the evaporation of my music library has brought me a new appreciation of the music I own. (What I have purchased, I can, for the most part, get back.) So I'm sharing a few of the best tracks I've bought in the last few years, tracks I had on a playlist titled "Songs That Make You Happy." Enjoy.