Weekly Roundup: March 22, 2024

Welcome to Spring It’s cloudy and cool in southern California today, not very Spring-like, but I’m looking forward to the sunny days ahead. It’s been a rough week for me for a few reasons and I’m ready for the weekend. For local friends, I’m doing a little brewery gathering to celebrate my book deal on Saturday, so message me if you’re interested in coming by.

Quote of the week:
“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” –Agatha Christie

What I’m reading:
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. This is a big book and my Kindle says I have only read 25% of it so far, but it’s fascinating. I’m in awe of the research the author did to put this together.

What I’m listening to:
I Am Yours: A Shared Memoir by Reema Zaman. This was probably not the best book for me to pick during a difficult week because parts of it are so heavy, but it’s beautifully written and narrated.

What I’m watching:
After realizing I’d already watched Season 1 of Life & Beth, I moved to Season 2 and it’s awesome. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried. Amy Schumer is fantastic. I also watched a mindfuck of a movie (my favorite genre) called Circle that was very entertaining.

Interesting things I learned this week:

• The jaw muscle (masseter) is the strongest muscle in the body
• “Crown shyness” describes the phenomenon of a tree’s leaves withdrawing from the leaves of other trees, resulting in a beautiful web of almost-touching canopies (see photo below)
• In Sweden, they have a week-long “reading holiday” called Läslov
• The longest word in any of the major English language dictionaries is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters), a word that refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano
• At the seven locations of the Worcester Public Library in Massachusetts, patrons can now submit cat photos instead of paying fines resulting from damage to or loss of books. Dubbed March Meowness, the special initiative lasts the entire month of March
• Research proves that naming feelings helps to settles down the nervous system. In one brain imaging study, researchers at UCLA found that putting feelings into words reduces activity in the amygdala and other limbic brain regions associated with emotional reactions
• StudyFinds consulted 10 canine experts to create a list of the seven most low-energy dog breeds. Greyhounds got the top spot, which I find surprising
• Sitting down with a good book could improve your memory, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They conducted a study that showed that reading for pleasure improved working and episodic memory among older adults compared to a control group that did word puzzles
• A New York man was keeping an 11-foot-long alligator illegally in his pool for THIRTY-FOUR YEARS and sometimes let people swim with it. The alligator has been seized by authorities

Crown shyness (source)

Weirdest thing I googled this week:
“cute as a button origin.” I told my daughter she is “cute as a button” and she was like, “but buttons aren’t cute.” Which is a fair point. So I googled the origin of this phrase. Apparently, the “button” in the phrase is not a button on a shirt, but a button quail, which is a very small gray, fluffy, squishy-looking bird (here’s a photo–cute, right?). The phrase was originally “cute as a button quail.” On a related note: the phrase “happy as a clam” is actually a shortened version of the original, “happy as a clam at high tide” (which makes way more sense). The more you know!

What I’m grateful for:
The highlight of my week was going on my daughter’s class field trip and seeing a bunch of farm animals. I love being around the kids! I’m grateful I got to take time off from work to go. Besides that, in no particular order: Texts that brighten the day, pet cuddles (pup pictured below), phone dates with one of my best friends and my sister, surviving a rough work week, my paint-by-numbers project that is like a form of meditation (I’m doing this one).

My sweet Rosie. I try to move her bed around the house throughout the day so she’s always in the sun.