Seen in the wild at our local Barnes & Noble. I think I’m slightly gratified that it’s at least remaindered, though I’m simultaneously surprised that it was produced in the first place. Someone got a publishing deal for this, people.

Walked past this on the way home from a lunch meeting today. I actually doubled back to get the photo of this wonderful headline. Don’t say I never got you anything.

I love these foam bathtime letters so very much. Have been thinking about establishing an in-house messaging protocol with them, where I have to draft something either meaningful or funny each day. The trick, of course, is that there is only one of each letter. Unless I get sloppy with the rules and allow upside-downys and number look-alikes to creep in, as they have in this newfangled text messaging the kids are so fond of these days.

But also, aren’t they just beautiful? It’s like alphabet cereal or soup without the empty calories. Turns out I just love letters. Happy accident, that.

• To place a bag in a plenty of the boiling added some salt water.
• To cook on moderate fire of 15-20 minutes.
• To get a bag, having picked up a plug for a loop stipulated for this purpose.
• To allow water to flow down.
• To open a bag, having broken off it on a line of notches.
• To lay out a product on a dish and to add oil to taste.

Isn’t Russian beautiful?

These are the English instructions on a box of boil-in-the-bag buckwheat that Spouse procured at the Russian Gourmet where he shops when he’s feeling nostalgic.

Just another in my series of small moments presented to you as an opportunity for reflection.

Spouse and I took Offspring to the National Zoo recently. We’ve taken to doing this so often that we actually joined their FONZ membership program. And we are not joiners, by habit. Though I do have a soft spot for joining things related to the Smithsonian Institution. What can I say – I heart them big snuggle-lots.

Anyway, we went there one recent evening to check out Zoo Lights – their annual holiday celebration. I’m not proud to admit that I’m a DC-native and hadn’t been before. To be clear, I’m not proud about both being a DC-native and not having been to Zoo Lights. The zoo – you’ll be relieve to hear – was in fact ornamented heavily with lights, and featured a couple of games, a couple of small light shows, an ice-like rink for skating, a train that I totally want to go on (but didn’t because it was unbelievably cold and there was a 30-minute wait) and other amusements.

All I can say is – if you haven’t seen a person dressed up in a giant panda costume dancing to Christmas songs in an enormous snowglobe, then you should. And if you haven’t seen my kid dancing her face off to it, then you just haven’t lived.

Best wishes to you and yours this holiday season. 

p.s. We celebrate a number of things in my house, but none of them happen to be Christmas. Nothing against the ‘mas, it’s just how it worked out. So, if you have a bug about good holiday wishes somehow impugning Christmas, I strongly encourage you to relax.

Another small moment in time. My gift to you – a moment of quiet reflection.

Took this photo with my AMAZEBALLS* iPhone 4s. It’s the sidewalk near my house – just after the maintenance guys from the high school cleaned up the leaves. It’s a little sad when they do this – no more fluttery crunching when I take Offspring to daycare in the morning, the smell changes from that awesome Fall-ness back to boring old highway.

The impression that the leaves make in the ambient silt composed of road exhaust, dust and disappointed entitlement that pervades the neighborhood is just a little piece of beautiful.

*technical term

I am very lucky in a lot of ways that I’m not going to list here because I have developed a distaste for torches and pitchforks. One of those ways is that I now have the bandwidth in my daily life to sometimes notice very small things that make – for me – time stand still for just a moment.

This wasn’t always the case. Crazy long workweeks, late hours, difficult (some might say doomed) projects, general stress, frustration and lack of time worked together to ensure that I didn’t notice one damn thing on my way home from work. But with the gift of a little brain space, I feel like I’m seeing more clearly. And finding tiny beautiful things that I want to share here.

As Ferris Bueller (prophet and seer) said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” And wouldn’t that be a pity? Also a pity, the fact that I just totally admitted to being a member of the generation that would quote Ferris Bueller.

Here is a snapshot from the other day. After hosing down Offspring with sunscreen before taking her to the playground, I saw this on the stoop. And it seemed like a nicely moody, New Yorker-like image that they’d put in front of some wholly unrelated piece of fiction. You know, the images that make anything melancholy? Because the fiction in the New Yorker never makes you want to just stick your head in the oven.

So anyway, here you go. You can thank me later.

It’s July. It’s alternatively hot and thunderstormy. I have an advanced case of Summer Slowdown Syndrome, rendering me nearly insensible for larger swaths of the day than I will admit to if pressed on the matter.

And on my way back into the house after running a few errands on Friday afternoon (the privilege of working for yourself), I glanced down to notice this defect in the paint on our front stoop.

I’m in love with it.

It stormed that night, and the heart washed away. So I am especially moved by the fleeting nature of this little random spark of delightful. It must be the summer melancholies. Look away. This isn’t going to be pretty.

We arrived, we obsessed, we sampled and tasted and discussed and ate some of those lovely flat Spanish almonds from WholeFoods, and we scribbled furiously.

Our tasting crew included some of the sharpest critics I know. Hey – there’s nothing wrong with having high standards. But they took no prisoners as they sampled the goods. They made a couple of suggestions for improving the methodology, including a four-part fizziness metric (bubble size, quantity, longevity and relative sharp/softness). These will be taken under advisement for future regimens.

And then came the tabulation. Man, do I dread tabulation. And now the results are in:

Trader Joe’s Sparkling Mineral Water wins!

Comments from our illustrious panel for Trader Joe’s included:

• Nothing special.
• Refreshing, thirst-quenching.
• [this space intentionally left blank]
• Tiny happy bubbles.
• Lots of sting/fizz, not enough sparkle. Fuller taste than previous 2.

It might not sound like a strong showing, but we had some pretty polarized reactions to many of the others. Assorted comments include:

• Fizz all bite and no sparkle.
• Almost industrial.
• To be reevaluated.
• Carbonated salt water.
• Needed an almond to cleanse palate.
• Dirty, metallic.
• omg bad.

Well kids, that was fun.

One surprise was that Safeway brand Club Soda tied for 2nd place with San Pelligrino. Testers noted that it had a sweet overtone, without any real mineral flavor. Fine work, Safeway!

So here we are. With a winner in a batch of 10. But we didn’t get to test all of the varieties I wanted to. I really was looking forward to lightly obsessing over some of the restaurant staples: Voss, Saratoga… so we’re likely to do a round II.

Suggestions for how to improve the second round are welcome! As are additional brands to test.

As threatened, we bought a bunch of crazy stuff from American Science & Surplus. Agar, petri dishes, a tiny vacuum cleaner shaped like a pig and a super cool microscope that you plug right into your computer that captures digital images.

Here is some table salt at 400x magnification.

I think this is going to rock my world and take the experiments to a new place. Meanwhile, I’m happy just to create some pretty, pretty pictures.

Feline Maintenance

Also, one of our cats is about to be relieved of some kind of lump on her chest that is either [big fancy word for cancer], or [big fancy word for not cancer]. In advance of the intervention, we took her to the vet today for a pre-op blood test and X-ray to make sure her lump is alone. The vet gave us a guided tour of her anatomy, and I’m working on getting a digital copy of the films. Will share them because I think they’re cool. You can see her heart, lungs, slender little ribs, extra belly padding and next week’s hairball.