Today is February 29, which means that it’s a rare breed, a blue-moon kind of event — something to be celebrated rather than taken for granted.

(Yes, I know leap years have been celebrated with regularity since 46 B.C., but that doesn’t really change the point. How many have occurred in your lifetime?)

So, how will you mark this special day? Will you plan an indoor picnic? Call an old friend? Drive to the beach? Eat dessert first? Take a trapeze lesson? Put on your favorite album/song/playlist, turn up the sound, and dance around the living room — with a special someone or by yourself, singing along at the top of your voice?

However you choose to celebrate, I hope you make it your own. Remember, today is a gift day — and no one is going to know if you waste it but yourself.

We got hacked last night (again), and my theme, being ancient in terms of the web, is being ornery. Rest assured that this will not be the final look for Sprite Writes, but please bear with me as I give my online house a new coat of paint and plant some new flowers. After all, my seventh blogiversary is right around the corner.

P.S. Thank you to Rudi, who painstakingly went through every file in my blog to remove the hacked code. He’s a good guy.

Update: And it’s back. Rudi pored through his files and found an unadulterated version of my theme. He totally rocks.

Taking a note from Amanda, a quick recap:

• Lots of knitting this weekend. Some of it fruitful. Some will have to be frogged and started — yet again.
• Rudi’s injury last weekend is unfortunate, but does mean I get to see him two days in a row.
• Some cleaning. Not enough, but it’s a start.
• Too cold to start the garden for the season.?
• Tea ordered from the Porto Rico sale before it ends.
• Bills paid, but no real mail sent.
• Anne of Green Gables on PBS.
• Hot cocoa poured from the chocolate pot into tiny heart-shaped cups and served with cupcakes.
• A yellow tulip procured — for free! — from the farmers’ market.
• Scones and tea for brunch.
• Sitting outside in the chilly sunlight.
• Dinner, family-style, at the local Chinese place with Phillip, Susan, and Holden.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Home in Connecticut for a planned long weekend, I am able to see both Karen and Danny. It’s rare treat to get to see my oldest and dearest friends — particularly on consecutive days.

2. Sitting low on the horizon, the moon serves as a most delicate bowl, waiting to catch Venus and an early evening star, should they tumble in the sky.

3. Mum makes two kinds of cupcakes for my birthday — blueberry-lemon and coconut. Both are delicious, as everything she bakes always is.

How about you? What was beautiful in your world this week?

Anna and the French Kiss, by Stephanie Perkins

From the jacket: “Anna was looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. So she’s less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris — until she meets Étienne St. Clair. Smart, charming, beautiful, Étienne has it all … including a serious girlfriend. But in the City of Light, wishes have a way of coming true. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with their long-awaited French kiss?”

My take: Anna’s father, a best-selling author of schmaltzy novels rapidly being turned into sappy movies, decides that his daughter needs a year abroad before heading off to college. So without asking her opinion, he enrolls her at the School of America in Paris (SAP, for short). In short order, she is plucked from a comfortable life babysitting her young brother, hanging out with her drum-playing BFF, and working at the local movie theater (a gem of a job for a cinema blogger and aspiring film critic) where her coworker seems to be getting up the courage to ask her out and dumped in a country where she doesn’t speak the language with fellow students who have spent years together.

But it’s not all bad. After a few teary nights and stressful days, Anna finds comfort in the company of sporty, Beatles-loving Meredith, artistic Josh, ambitious Rashmi, and charming and cute Étienne St. Clair, who introduces her to the world of French cinema when he takes her on a tour of the city. When it seems like things are finally starting to fall into place for her and her new-found friends, Étienne gets terrible news that threatens the equilibrium of their intimate group. Will it bring them all closer together or tear them apart?

Anna and the French Kiss does what Maureen Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes failed to do (much as I enjoyed that novel) — which is to plausibly deposit a somewhat naive high school senior on the doorstep of a European adventure. Other than having a rich father (who divorced her mom and moved away just as he was becoming successful), Anna is a normal teenager living a normal life — complete with an awesome best friend and a little brother she adores, an ex-boyfriend dating a girl she can’t stand, and the hopes for a really good romance for her senior year. Pluck her from that and dump her in Paris for a year — only allowing her home for Christmas break — and you’ve got a great scenario for a story. Throw in a cute boy with a British accent, a girlfriend, and a major life issue and set it a boarding school where they allow seniors more freedom than they’d get in an American school and write it adeptly and humorously and you’ve got teen romance gold.

Many thank you’s to all the book bloggers who put Perkins’ second novel on 2011′s best of lists. Without that nudge, I wouldn’t have remembered that Anna and the French Kiss had been languishing on my To Be Read list for more than a year. I would rank Stephanie Perkins’ first novel up there with Sarah Dessen’s work as being a great contemporary book for teen girls — and that’s saying a lot.

Pages: 372

Three beautiful things from my birthday week:

1. I emerge on Tuesday afternoon to discover that Looped and their knitterly minions have yarn-bombed the walk from their shop down to the Phillips Collection for Valentine’s Day. Trees, tree boxes, fences, and light poles are all covered with pink and red yarn and hearts.

2. I mention that we haven’t had waffles recently — a real shame since I got quite a bit of maple syrup for Christmas. So on Saturday morning, Rudi makes me a batch, which is large enough so we can have a special Valentine’s Day breakfast, too.

3. Phone calls, text messages, emails, and cards arrive from around the world, reminding me that I am a lucky girl.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

Corey’s latest trick is to lie in front of the food dishes, dip his paw in, and pull out a piece of kibble, so he can it while reclining.

Another Thursday come and gone. Let’s look back at three beautiful things from the past week:

1. I need to get home quickly, and the cabbie who picks me up gets me there quickly, despite potential traffic snarls.

2. Quince, when cooked, turn from an apple-flesh white to a rosy hue. (They also smell delicious when poached with a vanilla bean.)

3. My winter volleyball team (to differentiate them from the folks I played with this fall) cheerfully heads out for drinks after our game. The matches themselves were not particularly good, so it’s especially refreshing that we all end the evening on a positive note.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever by Benjamin Mee

From the jacket: “In the market for a house and the adventure of a lifetime, Benjamin Mee decided to uproot his family and move them to an unlikely new home: a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside, complete with over 200 exotic animals. Mee, who specializes in animal behavior, had a dream to refurbish the zoo and run it as a family business. Naturally, friends and colleagues thought he was crazy.”

My take: It sounds like an ideal story, doesn’t it? An English guy, family in tow, buys a rundown private zoo with the intent of restoring it to its former glory and turning it into a reseeding ground for endangered animals. Add in family drama, personnel issues, escaped deadly creatures, a health crisis, and two small children and it’s what movie dreams are made of. Which may be why you recognize the title of the memoir I read last month — it was a movie that came out at the end of last year.

The book, which the film’s release brought back to my mind, has a lot of potential. There’s a lot of good material in it — from Ben’s start in the French countryside, where he and his wife Katherine are raising their two young kids — all the way through the Mee family buying a dilapidated zoo from an eccentric old British man in Dartmoor and renovating it. You learn a lot about a lot of different things — from cutting edge cancer research to what an ordeal it is to secure loans and financing to bring such a business back from ruin. You get glimpses of the journalist Mee must have been before he gave up freelancing for a little piece of Dartmoor and several tigers.

But the book is weighed down by inadequate editing. Characters are sometimes reintroduced within pages, while others reappear after hundreds of pages away with nary a reminder about their purpose in the story. There’s a lack of focus, as one might expect in a sprawling family drama that involves a tapir and peacocks, but it’s nothing I feel like a good red pen from a bit of distance might not have been able to fix.

So, I guess I’d say if you think the subject matter interests you, it’s worth seeking the book out. But I didn’t connect with it in the way I expected to.

Pages: 261

How To Save a Life by Sara Zarr

From the jacket: “Jill MacSweeney just wishes everything could go back to normal. But ever since her dad died, she’s been isolating herself from her boyfriend, her best friends — everyone who wants to support her. And when her mom decides to adopt a baby, it feels like she’s somehow trying to replace a lost family member with a new one. Mandy Kalinowsky understands what it’s like to grow up unwanted — to be raised by a mother who never intended to have a child. So when Mandy becomes pregnant, one thing she’s sure of is that she wants a better life for her baby. It’s harder to be sure of herself. Will she ever find someone to care for her, too?”

My take: Mandy is pregnant and looking to give her child up for adoption. Jill’s recently widowed mom, Robin, is looking to adopt a baby, and an open-adoption website helps them find each other. Robin invites Mandy to move in with them while they wait for the baby’s arrival — two decisions that cause Jill, still reeling from her dad’s death, to flip out.

It’s like her mother has become someone Jill doesn’t even recognize. Jill has enough to worry about without a pregnant stranger living in her house and without her mother making what seems like a sudden and insane life decision: Jill’s about to graduate from high school, but while she knows she doesn’t want to head to college right away, she’s not sure what she does want to do.

She suspects, though, that at least the short term answer may involve a boy — either her reliable on-again, off-again boyfriend Dylan or Ravi, the sympathetic anti-fraud manager who works in the corporate office of her after-school bookstore job and who, it turns out, attended high school with her briefly.

Meanwhile, Mandy has moved into a house that’s way nicer than the ones she grew up in. Robin is far kinder to her than her own mother had been, and she can see that the baby she’s bearing will have the childhood she never did. Sure, she might have glossed over a few things to make the story work out better, but she’s sure it will be for the best. Now if she could only figure out what her own happy ending might look like.

Told in alternating chapters by two teenage girls, this novel is about figuring out what you want out of your own life and what makes a family. You’ll end up caring about all of the characters — and hoping that each of them can find their path forward.

Personally, I found it such a compelling read that I had to stay up late to finish it just to find out.

Pages: 341