It’s time once again to see what’s been bringing me some little delights in the past week.

• Visiting my family. I haven’t seen my family since June of 2021 in those brief shining days when we thought COVID was going to be over. I canceled going to see them for Christmas because of the Omicron surge, which was the right call since several of them did in fact get COVID over Christmas. My parents were flying to my sister’s in Massachusetts for Easter and my niece’s birthday, so we decided to go up. Unfortunately my husband didn’t get to go because he had to stay home with our sick cat, but I’m glad I at least still got to make the trip. It was nice to see everyone for a few days.
• Good traffic. Having made several trips to New England by car last summer in horrendous traffic, I’m happy that for the most part I didn’t hit much traffic on either my drive up or back. Partly it’s because I’ve gotten smarter about my routes, but also I left early enough that I avoided most of the worst of it. It was just starting to get bad in Maryland on that stretch of 95 that only has 3 lanes instead of 4.
• Toll by tag. I really like the places where they’ve switched to toll by tag, and you can just keep driving while cameras scan you from overhead. It’s so much nicer than having to slow down for toll booths even when you have an EZPass and don’t have to completely stop. It’s nicer than even in places like parts of Delaware where they’ve separated out a couple of lanes for EZPass holders where you don’t go through a booth if you’re not paying cash because even then you have to make sure you’re getting into the correct lane. And of course for people paying cash you don’t have to worry about having money on you. You just get to drive and pay later. I wish they would switch everything to toll by tag.
• My sister’s family apparently watches Wheel of Fortune on the regular so we watched a few episodes while I was there. One night they were telling me how the contestants always say stuff like I’m married to a fantastic person and we have two fabulous children, and they were joking that they wanted to go on and say something like I’m married to a horrible person and we have terrible children. Then the episode started an a contestant literally came on and said I’m divorced from a wonderful man who gave me two great children. I’m guessing he wasn’t that wonderful if you’re divorced. We were all dying laughing. I was crying I was laughing so hard.
• Spectacularly losing at Sorry. I was playing a game of Sorry with my parents and my niece. I have never seen anyone lose as spectacularly as I did in one of the games we played. I had three of my pieces in the safety zone and then managed to draw three backwards 4’s in a row and had to take every single one of them out, and then every single one of them got Sorry’d and wound up back in Start where they ended the game. I didn’t like losing, but if you’re going to lose might as well do it as big as possible.
• Return of the inappropriate ice cream man. It got marginally warm last week, and the ice cream man that comes by my house showed up for the first time this season. I say it’s the inappropriate ice cream man because 90% of the time he’s coming around at like 10 pm. Seems sketchy to me. He got a new song on his truck this year too. At first I thought it was a different truck, but it was the same old truck with a new song. I’ve never actually gotten ice cream from him because mostly it’s too late. He sometimes sits right outside forever because there’s a little place he can pull over right across the street. One day I was trying to nap and he was just sitting there and keeping me a wake forever, so I finally decided I was going to give up and actually get some ice cream. Right as I walked up to the truck he drove away. And I’ve never tried again.
• Progress at work. I don’t know if it will amount to anything in the long run, but something I’ve been trying to promote at work for years now seems to finally be getting a tiny bit of traction with some faculty members.
• Cat waiting at the bottom of the stairs for my husband. Whenever my husband goes upstairs or doesn’t come downstairs in the morning when I come down our cat gets very concerned about him. She will just sit at the bottom of the stairs staring up at him. She doesn’t follow him up or go looking for him, she just waits there until he comes back down again.

And now it’s time for some musical delights.

• The first weekend of Coachella was this past weekend. As much as I love music I have zero interest in ever going to Coachella or pretty much any music festival except the Newport Folk Festival. I do like that I can sometimes watch some of the sets being streamed from them though. Last night I stayed up late to watch Maggie Rogers’ set.
• I continued to listen to music on my old iPod on my trip. Here’s some more things I found in this little archival delight.I kept hearing these U2 songs that I did not know and didn’t ever remember buying. Then it dawned on me they were all from that U2 album that Apple forced on everyone. I totally forgot about that.
• I hadn’t heard the song “Little Miss” by Sugarland in a really long time and forgot how much I like it. It’s a shame that after they took a hiatus as a band for awhile while they both went off and did some solo things that by the time they got back together country music was firmly entrenched in bro country and had no room for a mostly female fronted duo. I don’t even know if they’re still together or if they broke up again after that return album sort of crashed and burned even though I loved it.