Happiness is the master-hand

Musick resembles poetry; in each

Are nameless graces which no methods teach,

And which a master-hand alone can reach.

-- Alexander Pope

Happiness is a cleft tree

The cleft tree

Offers its kind concealment to a few,

Their food its insects, and its moss their nests.

-- James Thomson (1700-1748)

Happiness is the fabulous The Crystals singing the 1963 hit Da Doo Ron Ron

 

When you need to move water, happiness is a 2-in-1 utility pump by Everbilt

This unit functions as a transfer pump for draining a water heater, for example, or as a submersible pump for draining a flooded low spot in the backyard, basement or driveway. Connect to it using a 3/4 inch garden hose.

About $119 at The Home Depot.

Happiness is real lemon, real pepper, Atlantic salmon baked in the oven

 Skip the dry, bottled, lemon-pepper seasoning and do this instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Real lemon pepper salmon

 

1 2+lb. Atlantic salmon filet, skinless

canola oil

1-2 fresh lemons, well-washed, sliced thin

ground black pepper

salt

 

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Oil a roasting pan with canola oil

Place the salmon in the pan

Sprinkle, very generously, with ground black pepper

Sprinkle lightly with sea salt or kosher salt, if desired

Arrange the lemon slices all over the top of the salmon

Bake about 25 minutes on the center rack of the oven

Remove and squeeze roasted lemons with a spoon against the pan, if you wish, and spoon over the servings

Serves about four

Happiness is light yellow and cherry, the colors of July

July I would have drawn in a jacket of light yellow, eating cherries, with his face and bosom sunburnt.

-- Henry Peacham

Happiness is lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh my!

 

Happiness is clean gutters and downspouts, thanks to a Werner 24' aluminum extension ladder

Werner 24 ft. Aluminum Extension Ladder with 225 lb. Load Capacity Type II Duty Rating

This fella has just enough of the length I needed to reach the second story gutters in the rear comfortably, but only from the first floor patio deck in back, which is itself already elevated almost 6' off the ground.

It also reaches comfortably over the big shrubs and other plantings in front to get to the first level gutters.

I don't think the 20-footer would have worked as well.

The ladder is less than 35 lbs, but the gutter cleaning was still a two-man job.

 

 

Happiness is a cat who catches vermin

Grimalkin, to domestic vermin sworn

An everlasting foe, with watchful eye

Lies nightly brooding o'er a chinky gap,

Protending her fell claws, to thoughtless mice

Sure ruin.

 

-- John Philips (1676-1709)

Happiness is a silvan scene

Betwixt two rows of rocks, a silvan scene

Appears above, and groves for ever green.

-- John Dryden

Happiness is RMS Queen Mary: My dad came home on her in 1945

After decades of rocky seas in Long Beach, Queen Mary in danger of sinking. Can it be saved?:

'After the start of World War II, it was painted gray and converted into a troopship that ferried Allied soldiers, earning the nickname the “Grey Ghost” for its speed and camouflaged color.'

Arriving in New York Harbor, 20 June 1945, with thousands of US soldiers – there is a prominent degaussing coil running around the outer hull.

 

Happiness is the color of June

 June is drawn in a mantle of dark green.

 

-- Henry Peacham (1578-c.1644)

Happiness is escaping the enemies of the homestead

The nightly wolf is baneful to the fold,

Storms to the wheat, to buds the bitter cold.

-- John Dryden

Happiness is contentment

'Tis better to be lowly born,

And range with humble livers in content,

Than to be perk'd up in a glist'ring grief,

And wear a golden sorrow.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VIII

Happiness is watching Gordon Ramsay make mayo in less than two minutes

 

The secret is 100ml of neutral oil per egg yolk, added ever so slowly at the start. A three egg yolk recipe seems about right for a standard food processor as in the video. I got away with just two. For small batches of mayo, a smaller food processor is ideal.

The beauty of the Cuisinart that I own is that it comes with a lid with an oil reservoir on top which dispenses the oil through a pinhole at the ideal rate.

I add capers at the end for the Tuesday night beer-battered cod fry tartar sauce. In the absence of the juice of a lemon, substitute white vinegar.

Happiness is a Deltec home, designed to withstand Category 5 hurricanes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Designed for disaster: These homes can withstand a Category 5 hurricane

'Matt Oblinsky, Deltec’s director of engineering, spearheads an effort to constantly find better building materials to further strengthen its designs.

'“After each and every hurricane … we reach out to each and every homeowner in the path of a storm to ask how they are,” Linton said. “99.9 percent of the time we’re seeing ‘we lost a couple shingles’ or ‘we lost a piece of trim, but our neighbor’s home was demolished.’ Our homes have been field-tested for a number of years.”'

Happiness is the nonsense verse chant Flea Fly Flow from Boy Scout camp in the 1960s

The chant is a "repeat after me" or "echo" song. The leader at the campfire chants a line, the boys gathered round are to echo it exactly in reply.

There are many, many versions.

The idea was to make the nonsense lines a little longer each time and to vary the elements in order to make them more tricky to remember, which is great fun but is probably why no one can remember the thing exactly the same way now. 

In this case, the nonsense probably goes all the way back at least to Shakespeare's King Lear of 1605 ("Child Roland to the dark tower came, His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man") and was immortalized in the English fable Jack the Giant Killer of 1711 ("Fee-fi-fo-fum").

"Fie!" is an old word which you use when you smell something really bad, i.e. a stench, a subject of some fascination for young boys.

By beginning with an allusion to the form of these then well known lines, the expectation was set for something familiar to come, but is immediately turned into a tongue twister to set the audience of young boys off their balance and arrest their attention and engage them. It needs to be remembered that boys were then relatively better educated than they are these days, and that it was fun to play loose as it were with the otherwise more or less serious subjects of their school days.

Add some strategically placed stick-banging and tub-thumping and it gets to be quite the scene around the bonfire!

The form is a playground for improv, but most if not all of the versions people now remember have regularized the opening tongue twister by incorporating an "L" in each line and element, as in Flea! Flea fly! Flea fly flow! 

This is how I remember it:

Fie!

Fie fly!

Fie fly foh!

Kooma-lotta kooma-lotta kooma-lotta Feast Day!

Oh, no, no, no not the Veesday!

Eeny meany deci-meany Ooo walla walla meeny, Eeny meany, hexa-meany, Ooo walla walla!

Beat belly oaten boaten Bobo benoten botten, Bobo benoten botten, Bobo benoten botten, shhhhh!

Happiness is the fabulous Linda Ronstadt with her 1975 cover of When Will I Be Loved

 

Happiness is Ed Norton from The Honeymooners

 

"Did somebody say I'm trending on Twitter? Well I'm HERE for it!"

Happiness is Do You Know What I Mean? Lee Michaels 1971

She's a dandy, yes indeed, but now she's free.

This is the Rock 'n' Roll you first heard fifty years ago and suddenly you wake up one morning with it playing on continuous loop in your head for some reason.