Another week. More delights. Let’s do it.

• Obviously if you know me in real life or follow me on social media you know that the biggest and best thing that happened this week was that I got two new crazy kittens! I will write a separate post on them soon, so I’m not going to say a whole lot right now but Molly and Loki are adorable, crazy, maddening, and I love them very much.
• Last week I was really wanting some ice cream after dinner one night, but I didn’t have any in the house and even though there are multiple ice cream places within 2 blocks of my house I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to walk and get any. I said to my husband that I really wished the ice cream man would come by our house earlier so I could get ice cream from him. He has a tendency to come by our house super late like between 9 and 10 at night long after I have any desire to eat ice cream, but then miraculously within minutes of me making that statement I heard his song in the distance. I was like I manifested the ice cream man! He’s coming! I got my ice cream and it was delicious. Plus he’s waaaay cheaper than any of the places I would have walked to.
• I spotted this recipe for Pasta with Asparagus, Blue Cheese, and Walnuts in the Washington Post the other week. Since it’s asparagus season it seemed like something we should try. The recipe offers a couple of options for pasta, but it’s first suggestion is gemelli and it’s what’s included in the picture. I’m not sure I have ever had gemelli pasta before. I expected my husband would just use one of the other pastas suggested since we already had those on hand, but he actually got the gemelli and I’m glad he did because I’m a big fan. I should look into other recipes that use it, though since tomatoes are verboten for me at the moment it probably limits my options.
• I love the smell of rain. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that in one of these posts before. I still do.
• Went to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night. I hadn’t been to the BSO since before COVID. Awhile back they sent me a survey saying if you answer these three whole questions we’ll give you free tickets to your choice of one of our remaining shows of the season. I presume to get me back to remind me what I’ve been missing and inspire me to pay to go again in the future. I did not 100% know what I was choosing as whatever I looked at to choose a show I don’t think gave me a good description of what the music was going to be. It had the names of the featured vocalists and then also mentioned a tap dancer. I love tap dancing, and it was one of the couple shows that fit into our schedule so I was sold. It turns out that it was a night of big band era/swing/Cotton Club hey day jazz music. I thought it was great. I pretty much knew all the songs not because I ever seek that music out but because at least for people of my age it’s just music that you’ve heard over and over in pop culture of some sort or another. The tap dancing was delightful as expected. I was very happy with my choice, and it did make me think I need to go to the BSO more. We’ll see if I ever follow through on it though.
• Sunday night was one of our season tickets to the Broadway touring shows at the Hippodrome. This month was Six, which was one of the shows I was most looking forward to this season. I was not disappointed. I loved it, and it was a lot of fun that the audience was full of teenage girls who were super into it and have clearly been those theatre kids singing their hearts out along to the cast recording for years. I even saw a number of them doing some cosplay. The poor boy sitting next to me who was probably about 9 or 10 years old did not it though. A lot of the jokes were going over his head some because they were more adult humor and some because he just didn’t get the references like a joke about being glad her son was born Edward instead of Edwina. He didn’t get what that meant probably because he couldn’t parse what the word Edwina meant. The audience would laugh at something and he would ask his mom what was funny because he desperately wanted to understand what he was missing.
• Old Bay goldfish crackers are back! They had a limited edition run of these about a year ago, and they sold out pretty quickly. We snagged a couple of bags, but then once those were gone we couldn’t get more. As soon as I saw the announcement and realized I could order some online from Target I ordered 4 bags. Then my husband spotted a display of them at the grocery store and bought two more. We’ll leave some for the rest of you now since apparently they are still only going to be a limited engagement. That will lead us into our musical delights because with the announcement of their return they put out this updated version of Lisa Loeb’s hit song “Stay”.

• I heard the song “So Far Away” by Dire Straits on the radio, and it reminded me of one of the final episodes of Halt and Catch Fire, which is a great show that I think has unfairly faded into tv history because it was great and should be remembered and recommended. So consider this my recommendation to go watch it if you never did. It made me think of a couple of other great uses of music in TV that I saw recently. When I eventually get my act together and write another TV Diary post, I’ll be talking about the show The Law According to Lidia Poet. I don’t think it really gives anything away to say that the final scenes of the season (hopefully not series) were set to the song “King” by Florence + the Machine. Given the themes of the entire series it was an absolutely perfect piece of music to use. Finally, we watched the finale of the second season of Single Drunk Female this week and the final scene, which again doesn’t really give anything away, is set to the song “And It’s Still Alright” by Nathaniel Rateliff. It again felt like a perfect song to soundtrack a show about a young woman trying to overcome her alcoholism and figure out how move on with her life since the song is about Nathaniel dealing with the death of his friend and producer Richard Swift who died from complications of alcoholism.