I feel like I wasn’t quite as attentive to things bringing me delight last week. I’ve been in a bad mood watching everyone else back to living their pre-COVID lives and wondering when it will ever feel safe to do so and feeling like more and more people are judging me for being cautious, my cat was sick for several days (though thankfully appears to be better now), our never ending mouse problem is back, and the weather has been crap. So I’ve been more focused on the negative unfortunately. But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to find the good in between the bad. So let’s get to it.

• The smell of rain. I love that smell that happens when rain is about to happen. It’s been rainy here a lot lately, so I’ve gotten to enjoy that a few times recently including a little bit this morning though it wasn’t very strong. It’s about to rain for like 4 days straight, so at least I get a little bit of that good rain smell to go with it. I recently read an article about what creates that smell, and I regret it a little because it not only took some of the mystery out of it, but it’s not the most pleasant sounding reason that it happens.
• The new trailer for Maverick. I love the movie Top Gun. I have seen it so many times including the first time when my parents left us with some babysitter while they went away for a weekend and she took us to see it even though it is decidedly not something my parents would have let us see at that age. So despite the fact that Maverick is everything I claim to hate about movies these days with it’s shameless nostalgia sequelness, I am all in on this movie. I am unreasonably excited to see it against my better judgement. It’s been pushed back multiple time because of COVID, but it seems like it will finally be out Memorial Day weekend. I am willing COVID to let numbers be low enough at that point that I will finally feel like venturing back to a movie theater to see it. Anyway, they dropped a new trailer for it last week, and I am still super excited about it. I’m also a little mad at myself for not figuring out before that of course Goose’s son was going to be one of the pilots because duh.
• Getting my hair cut. It had been 10 months since I last got my hair cut. Basically the last time COVID numbers were low and we actually thought they would stay that way. If I had known then what I know now I would have gotten it cut shorter than I did so that it had more runway to grow out before it got too long. My hair is super fine and thin naturally and because one of my medications is a low dose of a chemo drug it is even thinner due to drug induced hair loss. So if it starts getting too long it just looks super stringy and gets really tangly at the ends. It was starting to drive me crazy and kept getting caught in my mask straps, so it was time for it to go. I waited until after my trip to New York and then snuck it in before COVID cases get too much higher. Now it is much nicer to look at and deal with.
• New Maryland Congressional map. I am firmly anti-gerrymandering or anything that does not make our elections as free and fair and easy for people to vote in as possible. We have a long way to go in all of those areas, but at least Maryland is slightly less terrible now. That weird squiggly mess in the middle of the map is my current Congressional district. I think we can all agree that it is insane. The new district makes much more sense. I am a little sad that my house will literally no longer be both the north/south and east/west dividing line in some weird jut off in our current district because that was a fun little fact, but it was also insane so time for it to go.

And now it’s time for your musical delights. I can’t believe I didn’t have any last week. Don’t worry, I have plenty this week.

• Rediscovering songs. My car is ancient and cheap and doesn’t have a bluetooth connection. This wasn’t a problem with my old phone because it had a headphone jack I could use to plug into the car stereo with an aux cable. Now that I have an iPhone and have no headphone jack (grrrr) I can’t do that anymore. So for our drive up to NYC the other weekend I dug up my old iPod nano to plug into my stereo because it does still have an old 32 pin iPod connector on it. I didn’t adjust anything on the iPod. I just went with whatever I was listening to circa 2008/2009. That was a fun little time capsule of songs, some of which I did not even recognize, but some were some that I had sort of forgotten about but are songs that I love and was happy to be reminded of like Vince Gill’s “Feels Like Love”. Then on the way to work last Friday they were doing a weekend jams roll out or something and played Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us”, which I had somehow forgotten about despite the fact that it was inescapable back in 2012. It’s still a bop. I sometimes wish there was a way I could tell Spotify to play a playlist of songs that I used to love but have forgotten existed.
• Driveway moments. Related to the above when I got home and Vince Gill’s “Feels Like Love” was only halfway through I sat in the car and listened to the rest of it. I always like those moments when you’re listening to something and you just can’t bring yourself to turn it off. Driveway moments are easier now that we have a parking pad in the back of our house. Back when I used to park on the street they led to too many people thinking you were about to pull out of your spot and having to wave people on.
• The female pop punk revival. I am very much enjoying the young women with their pop punk music that seems to be popular these days. I thankfully have connection to what they’re singing about with all their relationship drama at my age, but I like that this music exists for a younger generation and sonically I enjoy it. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about there’s of course Olivia Rodrigo, Gayle, and now Tate McRae, whose song “she’s all I wanna be” I just heard for the first time last week.