Let’s dispense with the preamble and get right to the delights this week.

• Last week I saw John Scalzi tweet about eating circus animal cookies. You know, the ones that are covered in pink and white frosting and little sprinkles. I think they are delicious, but they are terrible for you so I never buy any. The last time I had any was right after I got my second dose of vaccine and was wandering around the CVS for the 15 minutes they made you wait to make sure you didn’t have a reaction. They had an Easter themed version of them half off because it was just after Easter, so I treated myself. They weren’t something we ever really had in my house growing up either, but the family I babysat for every day after school in high school had them on the regular so I used to eat them there. Anyway, the day after I saw that tweet and was thinking about how I could go for some of them, we had a work meeting where there were snacks and they had little individual bags of these cookies! It was like a sign, so I had to cheat on this low acid diet I’m still try and eat them.
• I had a couple of days last week where I hit the stop lights almost perfectly on my way home. My already fairly short commute is so much faster when I hit the lights green instead of red.
• Somebody Feed Phil was renewed for another season. I love that show so much, so I’m really happy there will be more episodes. The final episode of season 6 really felt like a series finale, so I was resigned to it being over. Then I got a nice surprise this week when Netflix announced they were renewing it for a seventh season.
• Stoolgate. I love how this stolen barstool from a bar in my neighborhood became actual news.
• My nieces gave me a snuggly blanket for Christmas. One side is white fleecey material. The other day the cat was sitting on the sofa with her crossed paws propped up on it. It totally reminded me of one of those 80s like Sears or JCPenney photo studio photos. I’m almost certain there is one of me as a small child with my hands placed on top of each other on a box covered in some similar white fleecy looking material. If there isn’t one specifically of me I’ve definitely seen other people’s. Alas the cat ran away as I was trying to take a photo of her, and I don’t actually have the supposed photo of me in my possession, but I really wanted to make a side-by-side photo collage of us.
• Ed Wilson was a professor at Wake Forest where I went to college who is affectionately known as “Mr. Wake Forest”. He was a graduate of the school and then spent his entire career as an English professor there. There is a wing of the university’s library named after him. I was never lucky enough to take a class him. He was an emeritus professor by the time I was there, but he would teach a class every once in awhile. I had friends who were in his poetry class, but I could never get into one as a non-English major. However, one of my early memories of being a student at Wake Forest was going to see the movie Michael Collins and then being invited back to his house to have a discussion about it. It was one of the most special experiences of my time there. Anyway, he was quite old when I was a student make in the mid to late 90s, so I sort of assumed he had passed away at some point. However, I saw news this week about celebrations for his 100th birthday! I was so delighted that he was still alive and celebrating such a momentous birthday.

And now for your musical delights.

• I’ve said a number of times before that I’m not the hugest fan of Beyoncé, but I have been very much enjoying dancing in my car to “Cuff It” every time I hear it on the radio. We’ll also just concentrate on and celebrate the fact that she’s the most Grammy winning artist of all time and not the fact that the Grammy’s keep snubbing her in the major categories. I don’t even love most of her music that much, and the more I think about it the angrier I get that she didn’t at least win for Best Album. Renaissance was a real album. Like designed to be listened to from back to front with the interstitial’s connecting the songs and moving you from one to the other. I don’t know how people could say Harry Styles put out a better album. Get it together Grammy voters.
• I heard a song on my way to work the other day that sounded very familiar to me, but that I couldn’t quite place. I could definitely place the era it was from though, and I was like this song perfectly encapsulates a certain genre of music from the late 90s and early 2000s. I immediately thought about including it in this post. The only problem was I just didn’t know what it was. I was driving alone in the car, so I couldn’t Shazaam it. I tried to keep some lyrics in my head until I got into my office, so I could Google them and try and figure it out. Unfortunately the lyrics were too close to too many other songs that also had those lyrics as their title. I also heard it on this weird sometimes high school radio station, so they don’t have playlists like all the major stations do. I was almost ready to give up on ever figuring out what it was. Then I decided to have one more go at trying to find it. I don’t remember what I did to switch up my search, but I found it! It was Sarah Harmer’s “Basement Apartment”. Now it’s one of my Spotify playlists, and I won’t forget it.