Dr. Barbara Ann Kipfer is the author of 14,000 Things to be Happy About (with more than one million copies in print).
She has written 50 books including The Wish List, 8,789 Words of Wisdom, Instant Karma, Self-Meditation, The Order of Things, and 1,400 Things for Kids to be Happy About; Roget's International Thesaurus, Dictionary of American Slang, 4,000 Questions for Getting to Know Anyone and Everyone, Consider This, The Life of Language, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology, Dictionary of Artifacts, The Archaeologist's Fieldwork Companion, and The Culinarian. Barbara's books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Barbara holds a PhD and MPhil in Linguistics (University of Exeter), a PhD in Archaeology (Greenwich University), an MA (Greenwich University) and PhD in Buddhist Studies (Akamai University), and BS in Physical Education (Valparaiso University).
Dr. Kipfer is the lexicographer for Federated Media Publishing. She has worked for such companies as Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, Answers.com, Ask Jeeves, Bellcore/Telcordia, General Electric Research, IBM Research, idealab, Knowledge Adventure, and Wolfram|Alpha. Barbara is also a Registered Professional Archaeologist. Her other website is Reference Wordsmith.
The site is managed and updated by Barbara Ann Kipfer and Paul Legan. All illustrations are custom-made for this site by Paul Meisel. The website design is by K&P Ventures.
The site thingstobehappyabout.com is built from my original small spiral notebook which I started writing in sixth grade (1966). I carried it with me, noting things that brought happiness to me or others. One notebook became two, then multiplied, got bigger, eventually turned into computer files and, 20 years later, became the book, 14,000 things to be happy about. I still keep a notebook of things to be happy about and the list has grown to more than 135,000 things.
Places to visit on the site:
- Barbara's Bungalow: About the Author and Site
- cloud: things to be happy about today (calendar)
- General Store: Books, CafePress, Gadgets, Widgets
- Create a List: Make and Send Happy Lists
- Happy House: things to be happy about
- Idea Bank: Submit Thoughts
- Karma Cabin: Instant Karma
- Kids' Corral: Things for Kids to Be Happy About
- Link Lake: Six Degrees of Happiness
- List Farm: Commonplace Book
- Meditation Yurt: Self-Meditation
- Mt. Nostalgia: Things to be Nostalgic About
- Picnic Park: Life Needs a Menu
- Schoolhouse: Bunch of Questions, Lesson Plans, and Word Trivia
- Wisdom Well: Words of Wisdom
- Wish Upon a Star: Wish List
- Writer's Block: Serendipity
copyright 1997- Barbara Ann Kipfer
