Each Monday, I discuss my Scrap Happy project based on Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.
Next week, I kick off my new monthly blog hop tied to The Happiness Project.
Today, I am going to discuss Buying Some Happiness. I was a bit skeptical of this chapter because we all know that buying something can give us a quick boost but it doesn’t usually last. Rubin’s main goals under buying some happiness are balanced. In fact they remind me of my daughter’s piggy bank, which has four slots: save, donate, invest, and spend. It might not be the perfect parallel, but it works for me.
Let’s start with spend or indulging in a modest splurge. Here’s what I came up with:
IPod speakers. I have an IPod but never bought speakers because I had an old set from my discman (remember those?). Well, I finally hooked those speakers up to my IPod but they were broke. I tossed them and decided to buy speakers for my IPod. I only spent about $20 on the speakers (they were on sale) and they are not the best speakers, but they do the job. I have them set-up in my scrapbook area so that I can listen to music and podcasts without headphones.
I bought an acid-free journaling book so that I could write my stories on the go. I considered just emailing stories to myself, using evernote, or something like that, but decided on a notebook so that I could literally tear the story out and add it to a page. Unfortunately, I haven’t told many stories in my journal and I have yet to add any of them to a layout, but I am glad I made this decision. If I were a digi scrapper, I would probably opt for an electronic version of this system.
One of the challenges of spending money to buy happiness is actually making time to indulge in your modest splurge. I have to take time to scrapbook in order to enjoy my speakers. I have to take time to write my stories in order to justify not only buying but carrying around this journal. I have to take time select photos and mail them. So spending money also means spending time to enjoy what you have purchased.
What kind of modest splurges do you indulge in as it relates to scrapbooking? Do those splurges make you happy? Comment below or join the conversation on facebook or twitter.
If you want to read more about The Happiness Project or my Scrap Happy Project, check out the other posts in the Scrap Happy series.
Are you doing a happiness project? Are you doing a scrap happy project? What’s stopping you? Join me today!
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Stephanie
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Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
