Happy 101 Award

A big thank you to Linda on the Flipside and Thomas of Destination: Austin Family for nominating me as one of their 10 blogs for the Happy 101 Award.

This meme has you naming 10 things that make you happy, along with 10 blogs that make you happy! At that rate the geneablogging sphere must already be well and truly covered off, so I'll just do the first bit.

1. I'm very happy that my William WILLSON was a shoemaker. Also that none of the other dozens of William WIL(L)SONS in the 1841 English census that were in Lincolnshire and born in Lincolnshire, or in Middlesex and not born in Middlesex, of the right age bracket, were not shoemakers. So very happy. Finding only one matching candidate was long odds indeed!

2. Ancestry scanning and making available the parish registers held by the London Metropolitan Archives have made me very happy too, given that the only other way to access them is via personal visit which isn't very practical from New Zealand.

3. The entertaining podcasts available via iTunes (and elsewhere of course) - current favourites are Carpool (Robert Llewellyn chatting to interesting people while he gives them a lift in an eco-friendly car) and Rhod Gilbert's Best Bits (Welsh comedian and his flatmate talking about everything and nothing)

4. My amazing partner makes me happy every day (6,134 days and counting)

5. Turning on my computer this morning and having my Vista gadgets tell me it's zero degrees in my grandad's spot in the UK and two degrees in my brother's spot in the UK - an improvement over the -9 (celsius) of a few days ago, and I love that technology brings me closer to them.

6. My netbook - it's been almost a year and we're still in love.

7. The joy of jam making - the strawberry crop in my garden this summer is large enough I can make jam, and it's great fun!

8. I still have one week of summer holiday left. One whole week! (less the day I have to work, granted, but that's because I have to process some payrolls for some of our clients and getting paid will make those people happy).

9. The Ingenious Edgar Jones by Elizabeth Garner - the best of the stash of library books I took out for the holidays. If Victorian Oxford and beautifully descriptive writing sounds like your thing, check it out.

10. A good spot of blog surfing - starting on one blog, checking out something interesting on their blogroll (or blogs the author follows), and meandering your way from blog to blog until you find something awesome, like (warning, adult language) http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/ (which is today's Blogger Blog of Note so I guess everyone knows about it now)

I hope that you all have plenty of things making you happy at the moment - 2010 is going to be a great year.