Weekly Roundup 28: Touchstones

During the pandemic, someone in my neighborhood began leaving beautifully painted stones around to be enjoyed by whoever happened upon them. I was always delighted to find one and would often take a picture. 

Not long ago, someone wedged one of the stones between two tree trunks:

and now whenever I pass, I touch it.

Touchstone is a word with an interesting evolution. It originally meant a literal dark-colored stone used to test precious metals. Gold or silver was rubbed against it, and the resulting streak was analyzed for purity.

The word later took on a more general meaning as a criterion for determining quality or legitimacy of goods or services. Flakiness, for example, is the touchstone of a great croissant. A touchstone can also refer to a fundamental part or feature, such as the touchstone album of a particular decade.

And it seems that the meaning has morphed again, to what Urban Dictionary refers to as a person of importance, a significant other, who completes you and offers unconditional love, ie your "rock".

Then there's a cultural touchstone, which is an event or phenomenon that connects people to a certain time or place. 

Or, you know, just put your hand on a stone :-)

Stay safe, stay cool, see you next week!

Weekly Roundup 27: State Flowers

When I was in Texas in April, the wildflowers were gorgeous. After I got home, I bought seeds for two of the iconic varieties: the poppy and the bluebell. I planted them in pots and awaited my own wildflower superbloom.

Well, it didn't quite turn out that way. The poppies sprouted but then sort of disappeared, and only two of the bluebonnet seeds made it to the flowering stage. But it's better than nothing! 

Last weekend, I saw the last of the spring columbines blooming in the Colorado mountains. 

I realized that I know very little about the state flower program, so I did a quick internet search. 

The first state flower was the coastal rhododendron, adopted by Washington State in 1892. Fifteen thousand women voted for it and started a national trend. But it wasn't made official until 1959.

The columbine has been the Colorado State Flower since 1899, beating the Texas bluebonnet by two years. Oklahoma was the last state to adopt their flower, the Oklahoma rose, in 2004.

Flowers are chosen for their regional significance and are often assigned a virtuous quality such as resilience, serenity, or hospitality. They are as varied as the Arizona saguoro bloom, the Maine white pine cone and tassel, the Nevada sagebrush, and the Delaware peach blossom (sorry, Georgia, they beat you to it).

I would imagine that every governor who signed state flower legislation was happy to do it, as a state flower truly is a beautiful (and hopefully uncontroversial) part of a state's identity.

See a list of the state flowers here.

Have a great week!

Weekly Roundup 26: Beach Reads

Odds are slim that I will find myself on a beach this summer, but I still enjoy a beach read. Though everyone has their own preference, my informal survey/internet search indicates that beach reads are usually fiction, either contemporary or historical, and most often fall into the categories of love/romance and crime/mystery. Horror is a distant third, but there are still plenty of readers, me included, who prefer their chills in the summer.

Non-fiction choices span a wide range, from food/lifestyle to history/politics. Memoir makes the list, but some of the most popular non-fiction choices include collections of personal essays, many of them humorous. I can see that. They're short, engaging, cover a variety of topics, and are easy to put down and pick up again without having to remember plot points such as whose great aunt once-removed lived in the groundskeeper's cottage a generation ago. 

Lists notwithstanding, the perfect beach read is one that will keep the reader engaged and invested without making them work too hard. Even grownups who have been out of school forever still don't want their summer books to feel like assignments.

Author Curtis Sittenfeld, who has written seven novels and one short-story collection, has cooked up a fun experiment. Using five reader prompts submitted through The New York Times, she's going to write a 1,000 word "beach read" story. She's also going to feed those prompts into ChatGPT, with the instruction to write a story in her style. 

Fun, yes, but also a little scary because what if AI manages to pull it off? Curtis is rooting for herself--what she calls Team Human--and I am, too. I can't wait to read the finished products later this summer.

Grab a good book, and I'll see you next week!

Weekly Roundup 25: Mid

You cool kids already know this, but "mid" is a slang term that means mediocre, of low quality, inferior, boring. We've reached the midpoint of 2024, and if the first half of the year felt mid, the internet is full of suggestions for a mid-year reset.

If you have a chunk of time and really want to be intentional about the process, this post from Living In Her Moment has a 12-step life-audit plan. Be prepared to spend some quality time with your journal, evaluate your habits and routines, and tidy up your space.

10 Questions to Ask Yourself for a Mid-Year Reset will also get you thinking about where you've been and where you're going. I particularly like "What is the best thing that has happened to me in each month of this year so far?"

If double-digit tips feel overwhelming, 3 Techniques to Regain Motivation and Move Forward is short and sweet but no less helpful. It addresses some of the science behind our often contradictory behavior around setting goals and taking action.

The internet being what it is, there are thousands of books, articles, podcasts, and videos addressing this particular time of year when we might feel at once stuck and re-energized. I had to be careful not to fall down that rabbit hole, because I might not resurface for a week. (It's kind of funny how reading about productivity feels productive in a way.)

I sometimes get frustrated and ask myself how many times I'm going to hit the reset button. I guess the answer is "as many times as it takes."

Welcome to July! I hope the month is fruitful for you!

 

Weekly Roundup 24: Summer Good Things

We're zooming up on July, which means bona fide summer. Here are a few seasonal things I'm into right now:

Outdoor Concerts: It was a big thrill to see the Rolling Stones live. Yes, the surviving original members are in their early 80s and the tour was sponsored by AARP (which sounds like a joke), but they still rock! That was a bucket list experience, but I'm also enjoying smaller, and often free, shows around town.

Spice-d Tea: Harney & Sons Hot Cinnamon Sunset teabags make the best iced tea! I found them at Target. For cinnamon lovers only.

Weed Killer: My husband is a fearless puller and poisoner of weeds. I'm trying to convert him to a home-made weed killer that is effective and non-toxic. Mix 2 cups white vinegar, 2 tablespoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of liquid dish soap in a spray bottle. As with all weed killers, it works best when used on a hot, dry day.

Chiller Fiction: Summer is the only time I read horror, and it's usually Stephen King. Perhaps I will choose If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas that came out in 2020. The title story features the character Holly Gibney, who appears in other King books, including the eponymous Holly, which I read last summer.

June Pride: The end of June marks the end of Pride Month, but there's still time to show off my rainbow-themed tiny garden:

Enjoy the last days of June! See you in July!

Weekly Roundup 23: Submission Summer

Tomorrow is the summer solstice for those of us in the north. Even though we have plenty of long, hot days coming our way over the next few months, I always feel just a tiny twinge of sadness that those days will be growing shorter.

One of my fond memories of having school-aged children on summer break was participating in the reading challenge at the local library. They always had such cool themes, which are selected by an organization called the Collaborative Summer Library Program. Since 1987, they've brought summer fun such as Cosmic Connections at Your Library, Build a Better World, and this year's Adventure Begins at your Library to kids all across the country.

In the same vein, I've given myself a theme this year, which is Submission Summer. As you may or may not recall, my writer word of the year is submit. I'm sorry to say, I've fallen off the pace over the past few months and have some catching up to do. But what better time to do that than during summer afternoons when it's too hot to be outside?

It may not be as fun as Thrills and Chills at the Library or Paws, Claws, Scales, and Tales, so I might just have to think of a cool prize to give myself when it's over.

Here's wishing you a productive summer season!

 

Weekly Roundup 22: String is in the Air

String music, that is. 

I heard my first ever performance by a string octet, comprised of the Dali and Pandan string quartets, brought together by the amazing Off the Hook Arts. The venue (a local car dealership) was a little unusual, but the acoustics were good--and there was a Porsche in the room.

The piece was written by composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1825, when he was 16 (which is like middle age for a child prodigy I suppose). It is written for four violins, two violas, and two cellos. What stuck with me--aside from the spectacular music--was the anecdote about how the acclaimed third, or scherzo, movement was inspired by four lines from Goethe's Faust: 

Trails of cloud and mist
        Brighten from above;
Breeze in the trees, and wind in the reeds,
        – And all is scattered.

From those four short lines of verse, the teenaged Mendelssohn imagined and composed a piece of music which is still being performed and enjoyed almost 200 years later. 

It just makes me so happy to think about how words inspire music as much as music inspires words. I hope Goethe got to hear the Octet before his death in 1832. 

See you next week!