Downpour

I'm enjoying lying in bed, listening to the rain. It sounds like a rainstick in the middle section, when everything is going at full force and you wonder how it manages to make that much noise.

Spellebrations

Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist has been making me smile for a few weeks now. But it gets a bonus post today because of a plot point that involves not one but TWO characters being past winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

You already know how much I love the bee. So you know I was amused.

Happy birthday!

Sure, it's a weird time to celebrate. But what a nice distraction to get an email from my cousin suggesting we gather online to celebrate his son's first birthday (a month late)?

Some of us ate cake, we all sang, we argued about things we have no control over and most people failed to notice my sister's friend popping in and listening for a few minutes. Just like any other family party!

A weird way to celebrate turning one, perhaps, but at least we got to celebrate.

Cassata cake

I thought it would be a good time to clean out my freezer, and what did I find in the back of it but two Tupperware containers filled with cassata cake -- a Cleveland specialty that features fresh strawberries and whipped cream.

(This is my sister's homemade version.)

They've been there for years, so I pulled them out to make room for something more practical.

I left them on the counter, assuming they were freezer burned. But as they defrosted, they looked.... fine. Good. Like they were edible.

And then they were.

If I knew that, I might have left them in there for when things get more dire. But they're defrosted. So I ate a piece (it was delicious), and stuck the rest in the refrigerator. They'll lift my spirits over the next few days. And now I've got room for another loaf of bread in the freezer. You know, the necessities.

Letters

Well, now. This blog started in the depths of the Recession, then has gotten precious little use in the subsequent years. But global pandemic and the anxiety that comes with it seems like a pretty good time to dust it off and find those things to smile about again -- no?

I can at least try to be more active here.

On day eight of working from home and day seven of not leaving the house (and if we're being honest, before that) I started to think about Billy Pilgrim, and how he came unstuck in time. I wrote an essay on that book (it was bad) and in trying to find it, I pulled out a box of letters I'd saved.

One was from a friend from high school upon my graduation, telling me about the first year of college and telling me if we didn't keep in touch, it had been nice to be friends. Luckily, we still do -- and I could send her a picture of the card so she could marvel at how neat her handwriting had once been.

I also grabbed a stack of letters from a camp friend who had become a middle school pen pal. We'd fallen out of touch in high school, but reconnected a decade later -- give or take -- when I moved back to Cleveland. I sent her some pictures, too. We may try that pen pal thing again.

It's nice not just to have the jolt of nostalgia, but also to have a reason to reach out to those friends (both of whom I'd been talking to in recent days anyway). It made me smile to see the evolution in each of them, and I hope it made them smile to see them, too.

Red handed

I just had to share this story, about how Genius Lyrics coded its apostrophes to track when someone (in this case, Google) copied them elsewhere online. It's just fascinating, and the choice for Morse Code translation made me smile.

Around the world

One of my favorite things about Atlanta is the diversity -- and the diversity of food, which lets me eat my way around the world.

On Saturday, I had tamales at a Mexican restaurant, followed by cream buns at a Korean bakery. I stopped at a Polish grocery store to restock my freezer with pierogi and ate Japanese food for dinner.

And none of them on Buford Highway!

I usually don't hit that many in a day, but what fun to cross continents in that way over just a few hours.

Racing stripes

On the way in to work this morning, I heard a song that made me smile. It included the lines "my dog has racing stripes" and "I named my dog Springsteen, cuz it was born to run."

Of course, I tried to find the song when I got to the office. But the internet isn't cooperating, and it's nowhere to be found! Do you know this song? Can you find it for me? I'll be forever grateful.

Swearing in

I came across this tweet:
https://twitter.com/emilynussbaum/status/1082336816412454913
which asks what book one would be sworn in on, if not a religious text.

I love the variety and thoughtfulness of the answers -- from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (it says "Don't Panic" in big letters right on the cover!) to "A Tale of Two Cities" to "Everybody Poops."

Mine? "The Phantom Tollbooth." Easy.

It's a game!

It's so nice to see old friends, and I was so glad to get some quality time with one friend over the weekend. It's been too many years (years!) since we've seen each other. And while time alone is enough to make me smile, this made me grin even bigger:

That's right. It's a Kinder Egg board game. I'm thrilled that it exists, and that I know people well enough that they will see weird things and thing of me and save them for a year until they can hand them to me in person.

(For the record: The word game is a bit of an exaggeration, but it was still super.)

Washboards

Nearly a decade ago, I dragged my friend (hi, friend!) to see the last remaining washboard factory in the United States.

She was at first resistant, but then loved it. We learned that the primary customers tend to be musicians and people who live off the grid, and we both went home with a lot of washboard paraphernalia.

I sent her this picture over the weekend, of washboards from the same factory in a south Georgia home I was touring. It made me grin to see it, and to share it.

(She replied with a long line of hahahas, and that made me grin, too.)

New life

It's a warm February, and the leaf debris that had gathered in the crease of my car's trunk apparently had some seeds in it. With sun and some rain, they've begun to germinate, and now I have a tiny garden in my car.

This isn't the first year this has happened. But I was delighted last time, and I'm delighted this time, too.

I did not realize

That it's been this long since an update.

But over the past several months, I've noticed hearts. On telephone poles.

They're roughly the size of a piece of bread and tacked up, seemingly at random, around Atlanta. Sometimes I zoom past them, and sometimes I inch closer to them as I'm stuck in traffic.

They make me smile every time I notice a new one. So I'm sharing with you.

It's a good day

When I get an email that begins "Dear Depraved Sickos."

(But no, for real. I laughed out loud.)

Abstract Sunday

Hi, Internet.

I make no promises that I will visit with more frequency, though lots of people will be looking for more things that make them happy in the coming weeks and months.

I'm happy to share with you something that pleased and amazed me today, though, as I'm sitting in the office the day before Thanksgiving, waiting for my phone to ring.

I've long been a fan of the artist Christoph Niemann, who I first discovered through his NYT columns. He hasn't published them in a while. But I stumbled across him today somewhere else, and it led me to his Twitter feed, and man, is it a delight.

Click through to see some amazing illustrations, as well as interviews and other fun things. It made me smile. I hope it brings you joy, too.

The left wing of a goose

The Olympics always manage to capture my imagination. I can't help but be fascinated and amazed by the work, the drive, the effort that goes into getting to the games -- regardless of the outcomes.

And while I've been fast-forwarding through a lot of the pre-packaged video pieces, I've been reading a fair bit about the games. (Let's be honest -- I've always liked reading more.) In doing so, I came across this gem related to the creation of badminton shuttlecocks that I just need to share with you:

The shuttles themselves are intricate creations. Yonex orders thousands of goose feathers a year from China. The feathers are then trimmed to size and matched by color, flexibility and other factors. Only feathers from the left wings of geese are used in the tournament shuttles. Satoshi Yuza, a promotion manager at Yonex, chalked that up to aerodynamics.

Can you imagine? Only the feathers from the left wing of a goose go into competition-level shuttlecocks. What a weird, beautiful thing.

Keys

Do you see this?

This is a tiny piece of paradise.

I spent the early part of the week in the Florida Keys on the invitation of a friend who I love to pieces, and hadn't seen in too many years. Being there made me smile, of course -- I mean, that was the back porch. Look. It's gorgeous. -- but it was the invitation that made me happiest. It's so nice to know that connections are kept, through distance and time.

We swam, and swam, and swam. We talked. We explored. We ate delicious things. And, I like to think, we refueled a friendship that I hope will last a long, long time.

Also, she shared this with me.

That's a book recommendation by Judy Blume. Who owns the bookstore. That we were standing in. (I've read the book and loved it. Judy and I are essentially BFFs now.)

We missed seeing her there, but being in her space was pretty awesome, too.

Downtown perks

My office is in the 'burbs, and though they're densely populated 'burbs, they're not very walkable. And while there are some things that can lead to grins in suburbia, you'll notice that I was a much more prolific writer when I was working downtown. (Albeit in another state.)

So a change in job duties has led me to spend more time downtown. And that's led to a couple things that I want to share with you.

First, taking public transportation to work means more time with books. And more time with books always makes me happy.

Second, I saw someone rolling a Coke machine down the street on a dolly yesterday. Just pause for a minute and imagine a vending machine walking down the road. It's a beautiful thing.

Third, I ran into two people I know on the street last week -- both in the same day, at that. One was a new friend who was also working downtown, and we'll hopefully grow closer and see each other more after running into each other. The other is my future sister in law, who was downtown to get license plates for her car.

Unless you work in the same building as someone, you're just less likely to run into them on the street in suburbia.

Today, 10:30 a.m.

A white-haired man driving by in a red convertible, top down, the seat next to him covered in a bouquet of bright flowers.

It was a weird day

And it ended with an email from an FBI agent that read, simply:

:)