Three beautiful things from the last week:<\/p>\n
1. Karen took me bra shopping on Friday (this how good a friend she is; she didn’t force me to stand under fluorescent lights in my underwear by myself). I came home with three new pieces of support garmenture, two of which even have little ribbon roses on them, which will stay as long as they don’t show through my t-shirts. It’s okay if I<\/em> know they are there, but I’m not particularly interested in having strangers on the street notice them.<\/p>\n 2. I admit it: I like words. I know an awful lot of them and enjoy using them. I enjoyed Spell Bound<\/em> and Akeelah and the Bee<\/em> a great deal. If I could only take one book with me to a desert island, it would be a (good) dictionary. So tonight it was with great anticipation that I turned on ABC to watch this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee. I was blown away. These are elementary- and middle-school children spelling multi-syllabic words that I’ve never heard of — and spelling them right, often, to boot. So I have to admit that even though I was competing against children twenty years my junior, it was with great pride that I knew two of the words of the final 25: koine and weltschmerz. Koine refers to a local dialect that becomes the main language of a larger area. (It is also the name of our Conn yearbook.) And weltschmerz literally translates to “world pain,” referring to a profound sadness about the shape the world is in.<\/p>\n 3. There are five kittens living at the house at the opposite end of the block. Rudi had seen them the other day and when we went out for cone (mmmm…. cone!) last night, we spent some time playing with them from the other side of the fence. And tonight I got a chance to see two of them nursing, lying practically on top of each other. There are three little gray tiger kittens (who look like their mother) and two black ones, including an imp who was using a low-lying shrub branch as a trampoline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three beautiful things from the last week: 1. Karen took me bra shopping on Friday (this how good a friend she is; she didn’t force me to stand under fluorescent lights in my underwear by myself). I came home with three new pieces of support garmenture, two of which even have little ribbon roses on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cats","category-three-beautiful-things"],"yoast_head":"\n