84. Picnik.com:

My favorite tool to edit photos is Picnik.com. When I was in middle school and high school, I fancied myself a bit of a web designer. Really my websites were crap, but I thought it was fun to code using HTML and watching something appear out of all those numbers and letters and equal signs. It was cool to have control over something, especially when you’re 13 and feel like you don’t have control over anything. Unfortunately, I never really progressed beyond that (I still draw like I did when I was 8 years old, I still design websites like I did when I was 13 years old). I thought, briefly, about doing graphic design or something like that when I was older, but I imagined that it would be tedious and the lack of my own creativity would be really horrible so I never did. But Picnik has allowed me to “pretend” to be a bit of a graphic designer, making photos a lot cooler and funkier than they would be had I just used simple Paint or whatever the heck it was that I used to edit photos on. It’s very fun. You should check it out if you haven’t.

85. Candlelight:

The power is out in my apartment right now because my roommate and I apparently blew a fuse with the 800 electrical items we had running at the same time. It’s very unfun, especially since it’s, like 90 degrees outside. It blows. But it also reminded me of some of the winter storms we had in Oregon, mostly ice storms, that would cause blackouts in Portland and the suburbs where I lived. I remember one winter we had a power outage for three days, and we had to use candlelight. I was about nine years old and I thought it was the coolest thing because I was really into the American Girls at that time, and I thought it was like living in the “olden days” like Felicity, my favorite American Girl. Nowadays, I think of candlelight as being more romantic than adventurous, but it is beautiful to look at. Even if it is really bad for your eyes.

86. Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies:

Usually I devote at least a paragraph to whatever my chosen thing is. But, c’mon, it’s freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Do you really need me to explain this one?

87. Blogging

How the hell has this not been on the list yet? OK. I did write about writing. But blogging is like an entirely different animal. Blogging is connecting with an entire community without leaving your apartment! It’s about making friends, making connections, with people from every walk of life without leaving your street. I have been blogging for over 5 years now and I still say that it was one of the greatest decisions I ever made. I had no idea when I was 19 years old how much this place was going to change my life, but change it did and that makes me very, very happy.