What made you smile today?

Interesting, thanks for all that.

Yikes, that's wonderful.

Great inline skating video!

Today hanging with Cass and Dan was really really nice.

What made me smile? A friend's FaceBook post today.
(name changed to preserve privacy)

Mom: 'Lily, this is your 30-second warning.'
(6 year old) lily: 'It's not my 32nd warning. It's my twelfth.'

Cute!

Mine's via Facebook too. I'm friends with my 4-6th grade teacher on Facebook, though he rarely posts. He was tagged in a photo that then showed up on my wall -- of MY class when I was a fourth-grader! All of those kinds of old photos are buried somewhere in my mom's extremely stuffed and messy attic, if they still exist at all, and so it was a revelation.

Also it's a picture of me at about the exact same age as my daughter is now. (Definite similarities but not as many as I expected actually.)

Anyway various wormholes (other people who were tagged) have opened and I've been looking at a bunch of old pictures, including my beloved 1-3rd grade teacher who I have zero pictures of. Very fun stuff.

Well said soz... I am linked on FB to many old friends and +/- 40 extended family members. Nothing gets the conversation (and the feelings) flowing like old pictures.
Have a great day!

A giant yellow Noddy Moon rising out my computer window.

and a coyote calling for me to see it...

A check from an insurance company.

One night last month Nigel was driving along Mystic Ave in Somerville, proceeding
through a green light. A car approaching from the opposite direction turned
suddenly into his car. He had a brief WTF moment and then got a faceful of
airbag. Luckily no one was hurt.

His car was a '96 Saturn that he bought for $1000 five years ago. He didn't have
collision coverage, so we had to make a claim against the other driver's
insurance company. There was some back-and-forth arguing. They said their
client claimed Nigel's turn signal was on (it wasn't) and so he was partly liable.
I went a little nuts when I heard that one.

But eventually they accepted the liability and sent a check. For $2500.

A friend of my ex and I is running for Congress (and good luck!).

Friends. Friends and their awesome children. Couldn't have made it through yesterday without them.

Marty's glee at being given carte blanche to take anything he wanted from hamburgboy's workbench/tool chest/garden shed. Marty's one awesome young man.

I had lunch with my brother and his lovely new boyfriend. This place is, to me, sort of an jewish deli style place. The clientele is local, usually older and often with children. We were seated next to the bar. The bartender was unintentionally hilarious. She should have been a John Waters character. She was dropping f-bombs, she told her barback to **** off. She was rude and loud. How the hell does she keep her job?

Tucked way way back in my memory is an image from perhaps 50 years ago. There was an eatery in Boston called Durgin-Park featuring long communal tables and waitresses renowned for being more then a bit surly.
I recall the waitress bringing our food and snarling at my mother, a genteel southern lady: "Hey, lady, move your damn purse, will ya?"
Is it still in business? I have no idea how I remember the name.

Yup!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durgin-Park

My relatives took me there during one of my visits many years ago. It was hilarious!

I took my mother there in 1969...

I don't recall how good the food was. I was not a big fan of anything involving fish, which was a bad attitude in a place like Boston.
What remained lodged in my head was the concept of communal tables. Here we were, a family of four from a different part of the country. We spent all of our time-every waking hour-in sort of a cocoon. But at D-P we were sitting next to blue collar types, asking each other to pass the pepper and then chatting about the Bo-Sox. I thought, at the age of 12 or so, that that was an amazing concept.
Decades later I am working on 2 real estate projects in mid-town Cville. The economy has delayed us, of course. But we slog on. One or both of them will include a floor (out of 15 total) for food courts. And given the diversity of the neighborhood (students, hospital employees and patients' families, and tourists), the notion of communal dining still intrigues me. So far I haven't gotten any allies.

You have one here. Will have to think of some excellent examples..
I understand they can make restaurant sense, re single diners; they can also be fairly interestingly done, not, er, junky. In fact, I think the primo place in LA run by Nancy Silverton and (Mario Batali? Joe Bastianich?), Mozza - or, not Mozza, but one of its offshoots - has a big communal table. Recently written up in either the NYTimes or LAT. I'll be back with a link (nag me if I forget - I'll either post it somewhere else or pm you).

As I remember, I was disappointed in the Durgin Park food. (That was a sad trip, when I was discovering my mother's dementia wasn't just a bit of forgetting.)

Well I have these two friends who live in sheltered housing together and they're quite the pair of opposites- J is literate with a rapier wit and T is illiterate with a heart of gold. Both are down on their luck.

So J is complaining about T to me saying that since he is illiterate and has no inner life he creates his own reality using those around him and gossiping and I said, 'Oh, give it a rest he's lovely and harmless.'
And J says 'Yeah, that's until you find out he's gossiping about you,' somewhat ominously and then paused and continued...'and you should know that he is.'

I said, 'Oh yeah - what's he saying?'
And J said, imitating T's gruff Wiltshire farmer accent to a 't' - 'Well, apparantly, according to the bloke in the shop - J and Rebecca were at the Wheatsheaf in Dummer and J was naked, save for a purple hood. He had a knife in one hand and a candlestick in t'other and he watched as a goat shagged Rebecca...one of the other guests called the manager when he heard her screaming in the next room!!!
I say, apparently - because I didn't see it myself - it's what the bloke in the shop told me- but I believe it because though I like Rebecca, mind - that ******* J is a corrupting influence!'

I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. I told J to tell T to call me next time something that interesting happens to me, so I can be there too.

(J was making the whole thing up - he's funny as hell- he was just trying to prove his point with exaggeration).

I would think of sending for the men in white coats.

Knowing these two people - who are unlike any other people I've ever known- has been an interesting and educational experience.

But yeah - I think eventually they could drive each other round the bend- though I enjoy aspects of both of them - I couldn't live with either one of them.
But you know - that's what they do in this sheltered housing mileu - they just say 'Okay - here are two of you who need sheltered housing - now live together.'

I hope I never need sheltered housing.

I only now found out that one of my ancestors lived just five blocks away from where I stayed in New York a couple of years ago.
More than 135 years ago, though ...