the happiness project

Hello, my name is Anna.  There’s a good chance you’re visiting this blog because of a book I wrote called Just Don’t Call Me Ma’am that came out in April 2010. If so, welcome, but be forewarned—this happiness project blog is very different from that book. Apples and oranges. Avocado and grapefruit. City squirrels and country girls.

Just Don’t Call Me Ma’am is about my twentysomething experience as a single woman working at ad agencies and living in all kinds of cool American cities while I tried to figure out what to do with my life. For more on that book, click here, or skip the summary and just buy yourself a copy—I guarantee it will be much more fun than whatever your last online purchase was. Unless that last purchase was a roundtrip ticket to Paris, in which case you win. And pretty please put me in your suitcase and take me with you?

This happiness project blog is something I started after I moved home to Texas, around the time I turned thirty. The short story is that after spending my twenties as a nomad I was ready to be close to my family and friends. The long story is, well, long—but includes an unwillingness to continue trying to live by what other people defined as cool and a very serious queso craving that was no longer satisfied with monthly visits home.

Not long after I returned to Texas I was set up by friends with man who I had gone to college with at UT in Austin, but had never met during my time there. This man lived and worked in the country and drove a pickup truck that was very large and covered with the kind of mud you can’t pick up in a city. If that statement confuses you, it’s only because you’ve never seen country mud—trust me, the stuff has a life of its own.

At first I was unsure about a life in the country, but after a while I realized that giving the country a try was a lot more palatable than a life lived without this man. I packed up my dog (a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Isabella), left my job and life in Dallas and moved to a ranch located outside of Mosheim, Texas. Mosheim itself has a population of about thirty—and no, that’s not a typo, that’s a thirty. The thousand-acre ranch we live on has a population of four—Isabella, this man, myself, and our son who was born last May.

This blog is a series of stories about our life in the country. It is neither exhaustive nor particularly educational and I don’t consider myself an expert on much except for chicken tenders and Blue Bell Ice Cream so please keep that in consideration while you are here. And if you’d like more information about me or my writing outside of this blog, you can always check out my website at annamitchael dot com. Thank you for visiting and have a great day.