things that make me inordinately happy

1. Rosemary mint body wash. I wanted the rosemary mint conditioner from Aveda when I went there on Wednesday, but it turns out that the rosemary mint conditioner is for fine hair, and that's not mine. Then I considered the rosemary mint lotion from Bath and Body Works because it was on sale, but finally I sprung the extra few dollars for the rosemary mint body wash, which was not on sale. It is very worth it. It smells amazing and it actually tingles. For a cheap soap person like me, it's a wonderful luxury.

2. Green pen. The only pen I had with me ran out of ink (sad - I bought it near the roundabout in Arusha) and I had a class and needed a new one. So I bought a green one at the stationery store and it writes really nicely and the green brightens up my notes and my entire day.

3. Clothes. Not new clothes. Not expensive clothes. Just clothes that are not the same clothes I've been wearing every day for the last four months. I only took so many clothes with me to Africa, you see, and I lost some of them and I left some of them there and I gave some away and now I feel like I've been wearing the same few shirts over and over and over but yesterday I got my boxes from DTL's apartment and opened them up and now I'm wearing clothes that are different from the ones I brought with me to Tanzania. Finally.

4. Human rights book. I'm taking all these classes. They require books. But until the school got around to giving me my loan money, I couldn't buy them. Now I have the money and I can buy them and it's a whole new world when I can sit in class and open the book to the page that the professor is talking about. Better still, most of them (although not the human rights book) are used. I think I'm spending less than $300 for books this semester. Terribly a lot, but very very little for law school which requires all these ridiculously huge casebooks.

5. Mr. Freezes. The sickly-sweet artificially-colored juice in the plastic bags that you freeze. I bought a box at the grocery store the other day and they are perfect at the end of a long, thirsty day, although I don't think the makers intended me to eat four of them in a row because I'm so thirsty. Maybe that's what water is for.

6. The beginning of fall. Today I miss my house in Rwanda a lot, but I'm also delighted with the cool breeze and I'm bubbling with excitement about the idea of the leaves changing colors.

7. Figuring things out. I work on this law journal and today I had to figure out how to cite a UN report and it took an hour and it was really complicated and I had to look in a million different places and offer different options to the executive editors and it made me smile. It reminded me of Classical Greek - it's a puzzle that has rules but also freedom. I love things like that.