Time for my weekly roundup of things that delighted me in the past week. I can tell you it’s not this hangnail that developed today. Why are those things so freaking painful?

• Ever since my cat got diagnosed with cancer I’ve been waiting for her to get really sick and eventually die. Luckily so far she’s been in pretty good shape since we started pumping her full of drugs to help with her symptoms and keep her comfortable. If you didn’t know her previous routines you would just think she was a healthy, normal old lady cat. But she has developed completely new routines from where she sleeps and spends her time. Every once in awhile she acts like her old self sleeping in our bed and doing stuff like demanding pets from me whenever I walk by her. She did both of those things last week, and I try to cherish them because I know they probably won’t last much longer.
• I got a nice little ego boost last week when I got a recruitment email from another library asking me to apply to a position they had open. It fits very nicely with my skills, and is a job that I think I would be well qualified for and would probably enjoy. However, I do like my current job, and there’s no way I’m moving where this job is. So, it will just stay a little hit to my ego and nothing more.
• It’s the time of year for lightning bugs. What a crazy miracle they are. So magical to watch. Like how do they even exist and why? I have many wonderful memories of trying to catch them as a kid. I don’t catch them anymore, but I find it no less fascinating to watch them twinkle.
• We went on a work field trip to a local museum that is one of those old, rich people houses that is now a museum. It was fun to get out of the library for a few hours and have a little outing with my coworkers.
• My church had a picnic after services on Sunday. I debated about whether or not to go. First off, now that I’m within the window of if I get COVID I probably don’t get to go to the Newport Folk Festival this year, I’m being even more paranoid about COVID than usual. Second, I just feel very disconnected from people at church these days. A lot of people I knew the best have either left the church completely since COVID or are just still doing services online, so while I recognize the same people there week after week now that I’ve gone back in person I don’t really know most of them. I’m not good at talking to people I don’t know in the best of times, and throw in paranoia about getting anywhere close to people and catching COVID and it does not really make for a situation where I’m getting to know new people. It was such a nice day out that I couldn’t say no to going, so I did and I talked to a bunch of people I didn’t know. So yay for me as long as I don’t have COVID in the next few days.
• We went to the drive-in to see Thor: Love and Thunder on Thursday. I am a big fan of the Thor movies, even the first couple that everyone else hates and routinely rank at the bottom of the MCU. They’d show up in the top third of my list. I was not interested in it enough to go brave a movie theater again like I did for Maverick. I happened to look at the Bengie’s Drive-In schedule and noticed that for opening night they were going to be a doing a single showing of Thor. Usually they have Double or Triple features and the movie I want to see is one of the later ones, which I am too old to stay up that late for. Since you have to wait until it’s dark at the drive-in this didn’t start until 8:45, which was pushing my ability to stay awake. Going to the drive-in has long been on my list of things to do in Baltimore, but I never did it for one reason or another. I’m glad the pandemic finally pushed me into and that occasionally it’s an option for seeing a movie I want to see on the big screen even if I don’t want to go sit in a movie theater with a bunch of maskless people.

And now for your musical delights

• Speaking of Thor: Love and Thunder. I very much appreciated the use of Guns ‘N’ Roses’ music in the film. It was pretty perfect. Though after pretty much solely relying on them to soundtrack the movie they threw a Dio song over the credits which annoyed me. Why not go with another Guns ‘N’ Roses song?
• As I mentioned in my previous post WXPN is doing themed Throwback Thursdays programming during the summer. This past week they were playing songs from 1982 and one of the songs they played was Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out”. I have loved this song since I was a kid, but it’s not one I hear very often. I have a weird memory that may or may not be factual or something that I just made up. It involves me hearing this song in a K-Mart as a kid. That’s pretty much the memory, but I legit think of K-Mart every time I hear this song.