First things first: happy, happy, happy birthday, handsome!  Also, for the rest of you less handsome people: happy Monday, and happy Thanksgiving week to my American friends.  We had a pretty relaxing weekend around these parts.  The main idea was to celebrate Steve for surviving another trip around the sun: good job, Steve.  But Saturday filled up, as Saturdays do, with a birthday party (one of Nugget’s friends this time) and then some pre-Thanksgiving food shopping.  I didn’t get everything I needed – Thanksgiving ingredient shopping with a three-year-old is not amazing – but I got most.  On Sunday, we hiked – naturally.  For Steve’s birthday hike, he chose to explore Widewater State Park down in Stafford.  We’d never been there because it’s brand new – as in, Governor Northam just cut the ribbon on it a week ago.  The visitors center smelled like new construction and the blazes were all freshly affixed to the trees.  They’re still in the construction process and I believe there is a lot more planned for the park, but we enjoyed feeling in the know and being among the first to visit.  And now it’s back to the grind, but only for three days – long weekend ahoy!

 

Reading.  Kind of a slow reading week, actually.  Not a bad reading week, just a slow one.  I lost some reading time due to bad commutes earlier in the week, and my parents stayed at my house one evening and I spent the post-kiddo-bedtime hours visiting with them.  But when I have managed to open a book, I’ve been reading good ones.  Four Seasons in Rome earlier in the week, which was lovely and lyrical.  And over the latter half of the week, and all of the weekend, I’ve been slowly reading Angle of Repose, which has been on my TBR for ages.  Unfortunately, it’s overdue to go back to the library so I am going to have to pick up the pace considerably, since I’m only about halfway through at press time.

Watching.  It was almost a “nothing at all” kind of week, but Steve and I did knock out two episodes of The Great British Baking Show on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.  There was pastry and innuendo, of course.

Listening.  Podcasts and this and that.  The highlight was the dropping of the first episode of the long-awaited Slightly Foxed Podcast.  I listened to it – gleefully, I might add – while driving to Wegmans (with a sleeping boy in the back seat, which is why I was able to listen to a podcast and not his commentary on every construction vehicle we passed along the way) and I’m already in search of copies of James Lees-Milne’s diaries.  This podcast is going to become a problem.

Making.  A Thanksgiving menu and grocery lists, mainly.  And on Sunday evening I made homemade lobster mac ‘n cheese as a special birthday dinner for Steve.  It turned out really well, and one of us may have picked every piece of lobster out of the leftovers before they went into the fridge.  I’m not pointing fingers, but this person’s name rhymes with Schpeve.

Moving.  The normal toddler-chasing, for the most part, but I can at least report to you that I’m riding my DeskCycle again.  I’m sure my new colleagues all think I’m really weird.

Blogging.  I have a bookish post coming to you on Wednesday – another entry on my Classics Club challenge list, look at me go! – and still catching up, October’s hike on Friday, you know, in case you local folks need any ideas for working Thanksgiving off over the weekend.

Loving.  So, I try not to fall for clickbait, but sometimes I can’t resist those I F*cking Love Science articles on Facebook, and I clicked one recently that has given me so much joy, I am literally unable to even: AI Trying To Design Inspirational Posters Goes Horribly and Hilariously Wrong.  You should go read it, but if you’re too busy, here’s the tl;dr – a fairly basic AI tasked with designing inspirational posters – you know, moving or wise sayings transposed on a soothing image background – has “gone insane” and is creating images that range from weird and hilarious to sinister to NSFW.  And the best is, you can go visit the bot and make your own images, but don’t, because you will lose hours of your life to this.  Learn from my mistakes.  Or do it anyway, because it’s SO much fun and you get comedic gold like this:

Or this.

Even for AI, millennials are a punching bag.  Damn.  Where’s my comfort avocado?  Then there’s this frighteningly accurate portrayal of anxiety:

This also scares me a lot:

Pretty different, indeed.  Here’s one that pretty much sums up the issues I deal with in my day job:

Get your minds out of the gutter, I’m an employment lawyer.

If only I had known.  Maybe I wouldn’t have had high risk pregnancies.  Also, the shadowy man at the bottom of the picture: why???

I don’t even know what to do with this one.

You can say that again.  InspiroBot, guys.  Go do it.

Asking.  What are you reading this week?