7 Quick Delights: Volume 31

Seven things have brought me delight this week, so I thought I'd share them for today's 7 Quick Takes. Looking for a pick-me-up? Seeking some inspiration? Try these!

~1~

Powerberries. Grabbed these on an impulse buy and they are sooooooooo good. Yum. Get some. You'll thank me.

~2~

Midnight in Paris. Knowing nothing about this movie except that it's a Woody Allen film that is getting good reviews, we went to see it the other night. What fun! I'm pretty sure I missed some of the great cultural references, but the ones I got tickled my fancy. Do you ever wish you lived in some better, more golden, or simpler time? Go see this movie!

~3~

Massage. Oh my. A huge thank you to Nicole for treating me to a fabulous afternoon at the Claremont Spa yesterday. We had hour long massages, we enjoyed the nine-head showers, the deluge shower, the steam room, the whirlpool hot tub, the cucumber-spiked water, the comfy robes, the quiet halls, the mini-vacation from life and bills and children and work and traffic and laundry. I had a moment of inspiration, being surrounded by all that beauty: this space was so lovely that it made me wish for lovely spaces...which is sort of impossible because my small, cramped house is usually inhabited by savages...the contemplation of which, while I was lying face down on the massage table being transported to another reality, brought the following adapted song lyric into my head:

If you can't be...in a space you love...honey, love the space you're in... love the space you're in... love the space you're in... love the space you're in... dit dit dit dit dit dit DIT DIT!

A massage is definitely a luxury that many people cannot access. But if you are given that chance, grab it.

~4~

Kid Free Days. We had a few this week. The space and the silence that kid free days open up are gifts from heaven. I highly recommend stashing your kids somewhere and doing your best to completely ignore them for a few (or several) days. Marriages need this, people need this, children need this. A win-win all the way around. (Except maybe for the exhausted grandparents who made this possible: thanks guys!)

~5~

Hi, my name is Monica, and I'm a Facebooker. "HI MONICA!"

Being a facebooker, I found Jennifer Kahn's profile of Jaron Lanier, in the current New Yorker, very interesting. Find a copy and read it. The article's full title is "The Visionary: A digital pioneer questions what technology has wrought." His ideas are very interesting, and important, I think, for those of us who use social media to grapple with.

~6~

Curiosity. Life is more interesting when we are interested in life. And people. And ideas. And history. And everything around us. My dad once gave me a really good piece of advice. When I was younger, I was always nervous about meeting new people. He told me to take the focus off of myself and turn it on the person I was meeting, to ask him questions about himself and get him talking. Not only did following his advice dispatch my nervousness forthwith, but it also has proven to me, time and time again, that people are very interesting and that I can learn a lot from listening to them. Sometimes I learn that the person I'm talking to is a self-important windbag. Sometimes I learn that she has just written a book, not the one she thought she would write, and then we have a really interesting conversation about books and writing.

Curiosity may kill the cat, but I think it just might keep the rest of us alive.

~7~

Farm land and old barns. I love them. I did a fair amount of driving this week, getting my kids to their vacation destinations, and I drove through the lovely rolling fields of California's farmland. I highly recommend that everyone take a drive out into the country and find a barn to look at. It just does the heart good.

image credit: http://architecture.desktopnexus.com

My six year old told me that she thinks such sights are boring...but maybe someday, an old barn will remind her of her mom, and how much her mom loves farm land. I think I could be happy if that was my one and only legacy.

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Go visit our lovely host of the original 7 Quick Takes, and clicky-click on some of the other Quick Takers for this week!

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