Hat on Top, Coat Below
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Happy Color Update: A Bit Past Mid-March 2026
March 23, 2026
Not quite six weeks since my last Happy Color update, during which in addition to coloring, I did a whole lot of life stuff I don’t usually (see photo diary entries for more on the moving house saga). I also did something with Happy Color I don’t usually do: deleted it from my phone. More about that at the end of this entry, but first the usual update, starting with this quartet of images that had been serving as separators between groups for a long time. I loved how they looked next to each other when they were done.
Groups I’ve finished since the previous update:
(most recent listed first; all counts include any friends I matched with the main images for the group, and date is when the holiday was, not necessarily when I finished coloring those images, though I’ve decided I don’t need to track those dates anymore so they aren’t on the recent groups)
– World Water Day (2)
– Dailies and mysteries for 2nd week of March (16)
– World Down Syndrome Day (2)
– Separators: tile patterns (4)
– International Day of Forests (2) [basically the same story as happiness day below]
– International Day of Happiness (4) [Happy Color seems to be changing how they handle holidays; this one was only mentioned on the Facebook page, with a bonus there but no image on the holidays tab, just an image on a regular tab that seems to relate but was not explicitly connected to the holiday]
– Separators: line-intensive patterns (8)
– Eid Mubarak (2)
– Separators: looping lines, wavy lines (12)
– Spring (8) [decided to not do a super mega big group for the change of seasons, just the ones I had been holding in progress and a few more that went with them]
– Separators: dense feather mandalas (2)
– St. Patrick’s Day (34)
– Separators: diamond patterns (2)
– Happy Birthday (24)
– Separators: spiral leaf shapes, distorted grids, wavy lines (8)
– Dailies and mysteries for first full week of March (16)
– Separators: wavy line boxes (2)
– Snow machines (2)
– Separators: tile patterns, wedges, dots/flowers (6)
– Dailies and mysteries for last week of February/first day of March (18)
– Pictures of the week and month for February (10)
– Venice Carnival/Brazil Carnivale (4) [got these bonuses late so couldn’t include them in the big group I did closer to the time but decided to just go ahead rather than saving for next year]
– Lanterns (2) [I’d saved these for the Lantern Festival holiday but when the time came, realized these aren’t the right kind of lanterns but went ahead and finished them anyway]
– Angels (2) [one of these I started to pair with cherubs for Valentine’s Day but then found another partner for that holiday image but didn’t want to waste the coloring I’d done on the angels and found them a partner]
– International Women’s Day (4)
– Holi (4)
– Purim (2)
– Lunar New Year (16)
– Seollal (2)
– Ramadan (2)
– Black History Month (2)
– Winter sports/Winter Olympics (60) [ended up combining these again, after having them together, then separate]
– Dailies and mysteries for 3rd week of February (16)
– Mardi Gras, Brazil Carnival, Venice Carnival (28) [all of these overlap in dates, so did them together]
– Dailies and mysteries for second week of February (16) [included two that could have also been included in the Valentine’s Day group]
– Valentine’s Day (100) [this group just kept growing as I worked on it]
– Tlusty Czwartek aka Fat Thursday (2) [February 12; did late because I didn’t see the image in holidays tab until the day after]
– Love Tree story (10) [for Valentine’s Day, came out last year or maybe even before that; the first image was in the Valentine’s collection, which is why I did it this year … I suppose I could have just done that first image but the completist in me still exists and gets her way sometimes]
– Patterns that had been serving as separators (4) [two distorted square grids and two diamond/triangle consistent shapes with colors making the picture]
– International Day of Women and Girls in Science (2) [February 11]
Currently In Progress:
1.) Separators: half circle waves (2)
2.) Pics of the week for first two weeks of March (4)
3.) Holiday/seasonal: Easter, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day, Fourth of July. (6)
4.) All the rest of the separators (16) [staircases, finely detailed mandalas]
Actually, that’s what was in progress last night, just before I logged in to google to sync my most recently completed pictures to the cloud and then deleted the app from my phone. I’d worked hard to get my in progress down to the minimum I could, knowing I’d lose them when I deleted and reinstalled.
Why I Removed the App, How It Went, and How Soon I Re-Installed It:
As I mentioned in my February Happy Color Update, I was going to look more into a comment I’d seen online about deleting and re-installing the app to free up phone storage, which I am always battling, what with my small by modern standards 64GB capacity and my love of taking pictures and screenshots of all sorts of stuff. The issue became more urgent recently as I was overdue for an iOS update, which said it needed 17.48GB of free space when I had less than 2, with Happy Color taking up 14.51 GB, far and away the most of any app. Rather than looking into the idea more to at least hear more about the experience of other strangers on the internet with deleting and re-adding the app, I just did it. The delete only freed up about 9GB of space (yes, despite it saying it was taking over 14GB), so I had to delete some old text message threads with photos I hadn’t looked at in years (I’ve done a good job keeping on top of pictures so messages is now my 2nd most storage hungry app). That got me up to 16.84GB free, which the OS update kindly decided would work for it. After the update installed, I had 16.13GB free. I then downloaded Happy Color from the app store and logged into Google to sync. My completed pics showed up almost immediately, and Happy Color was taking up took up only 426.3 MB of storage. I restored my in-app purchases (to remove ads while coloring) and I was in business. As I expected, I am having to re-download all the achievement bonuses, which means my bonus spreadsheet needs to be updated as well, as the re-downloaded bonuses come in at the top, not where they were before, so I’ll work on that a little at a time. The process is somewhat easier because at some point I started noting what award the bonus was from so I can search spreadsheet and find where those images used to be and just cut and paste the descriptions (couldn’t find all but every bit helps). This has also shed light on the mystery of some images that appeared in bonuses out of nowhere last December; those descriptions match awards bonuses showing up in the re-downloads, so I’m able to move those to the right place. Of course I could just not do the spreadsheet and save all this effort, but that’s not me. I’m happy to have storage space back on my phone and will probably do this again sometime. In the meantime, I’m reconstructing my in progress (probably won’t try and find all the same separators I had before) and moving forward.
On this date in 2020 through 2025: No journal entries
2019: Goal Progress and the Lack Thereof
2012 through 2018: No entries
2011: Not Quite Spring Skiing
2008 through 2010: No entries
2007: K. D. Pufnstuf
2003 through 2006: No entries
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