i love little (nice) surprises!  the other day, when i got to work, there was an inter-office envelope in my mailbox (not unusual) with a box of chocolates and a thank you card from a co-worker (very unusual!).  what a lovely, (yummy) unexpected gift.

today, i discovered another surprise–from you, dear readers!  i recently changed some parameters in my blogging account and asked that comments be sent to a different e-mail account than i’d been receiving them on for the past few years.  for some reason, messages from a new commenter still went to the old e-mail account (they have to be approved by me before they can go up on the blog), but all of the new messages from regular commenters were not showing up in either e-mail account!  i stumbled upon a comment today while perusing my blog that i hadn’t seen before and i started to check older posts and found all of these wonderful comments that i hadn’t seen yet!  wheee!  i asked mr. happy stuff if he would look into the situation tonight to see what was going on and he said, “check your spam folder” and sure enough.  my silly e-mail account thought that your comments to me were spam.  how very wrong it was.  but what a treat to get a big batch of “blog letters” all at once.

sort of reminds me of when i went to england in high school on a “missions” trip.  i’m not sure we saved anyone’s soul, but we had a lot of fun traipsing all over the countryside.  we spent the first half of the trip traveling on canal boats and navigating locks and walking the towpath and there wasn’t any way for us to receive mail.  i could send mail out from little villages we passed along the way, but for those three weeks, we didn’t hear anything from home (this was rather distressing to my mother who hadn’t realized that this would be the case).  when our time on the boats was up and we settled into our london location, we all gorged ourselves on big stacks of letters from home.  and then became addicted when we realized that this neighborhood got two deliveries of mail each day!  i don’t remember if i ever got a piece of mail in both the morning and the afternoon delivery, but that would have been a happy day for me.  i’m sure that the organization that i went with still does mission trips.  probably still does mission trips to england and maybe even using the canal boats, but i wonder if they’ve gotten e-mail access?  in some ways, it’s sort of nice to be completely unplugged from your home life when you’re traveling. at least for a few days.  it makes hearing from home that much sweeter when communication returns.

thanks for all of your comments!

mr. happy stuff has taken to wearing facial hair on a regular basis these past few years. i think it’s because no one at his job cares whether or not he shaves and maneuvering a razor around one’s face isn’t really much fun, so he doesn’t often bother. especially in the winter. sometimes he begins to look like a fuzzy bear (a cute one, of course).

(he’s the one in the back, in the yellow shirt)

but, whenever i give him a haircut, he tends to take that opportunity to remove all of the hair on the southern half of his head at the same time. this last time that i cut his hair, he came down in the midst of shaving with this cock-eyed smirk and a goatee he’d just created and said, “whadd’ya think?”

i think he thought i would laugh and then he could go upstairs and sensibly shave it off. instead, turns out, i love it! look how cute he is! he sighed and agreed to try it out for at least a day (“you can always shave it off,” i reminded him). for the next few days, i’d get this crazy grin on my face every time i looked at him and he’d look startled and say, “what?” and i told him that it was just fun to see him with a new look–the same thrill i get when we rearrange furniture in a room that has stayed in the same arrangement for awhile–zing!

the only facial hair change that was more dramatic in my life was when my father, who had worn a full facial beard and mustache for my entire life decided to shave it clean. i think it took me a whole week not to jump whenever he came into a room.

anyone else have any good facial hair makeover stories?