Thursday 3: April 9, 2020
Happy Thursday! I’m bringing back my Thursday 3 weekly series today. In Thursday 3 posts, I share three things I’m currently loving. These things can run the gamut from the things we’ve done together as a family to a TV show I watched to a lipstick I ordered from Sephora. I always enjoy seeing what other real people are reading/watching/listening to/doing/buying/etc., and since we’re all stuck at home scrolling the internet in the middle (or is it the beginning?) of a global pandemic, I thought I’d reboot this series in case you’re like me and want another place to snoop.
No. 1: Mystery Show Podcast
Okay, so this nothing new and many of you probably listened to this podcast when it ran in 2015. I’m a little late to the podcast game and just discovered this gem. In Mystery Show, Starlee Kine solves her friends’ small mysteries, the kind of everyday mysteries most people would shrug off and forget. I haven’t finished the series yet, but my favorite so far is titled “Belt Buckle“. In the episode, Starlee goes in search of the owner of an ornate belt buckle that was lost a couple decades ago on the side of an Arizona road. Most people wouldn’t bother, but the effort is worth the outcome in this case.
No. 2: Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo
In the novel Breakfast with Buddha, Otto Ringling goes on a road trip with Volya Rinpoche, a Siberian monk whose religion doesn’t fit neatly into one belief system. I really, really liked this book, which I finished this week on my Kindle. Religion has always intrigued me, so much so that I majored in religion. In college, I liked learning about all the major world religions, and, in particular, I liked examining where and how their beliefs overlapped. Reading Breakfast with Buddha allowed me to once again explore the possibility of a universal truth where all religions intersect. And I finally understand how to meditate now! (Still haven’t actually meditated, though.) If you’re more into food than religion, Otto is a food book editor, so there’s lots of delicious descriptions of the food they eat on their adventure from New York to the Midwest. Here are a couple of lines spoken by Volya Rinpoche I highlighted in the book: “‘Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.’”
No. 3: Safeway Grocery Pick-Up
In my last blog post, I encourage people to have their groceries delivered or to pick them up at the store rather than doing the shopping themselves inside. This week, we ordered groceries from Safeway and picked them up. After a little trouble with our first order in which at least half of our items didn’t get filled due to a technical glitch with the store’s software, we put in a second order and tried again. That time it worked great, and we’re thinking maybe this is going to be how we grocery shop even after the pandemic is over. The Safeway in our town doesn’t do store pick-up, so we ordered from the one in the next town over. You know you’re in the middle of a pandemic when the twenty minute drive to pick up your groceries is the highlight of your week!
Is everyone hanging in there? It’s hard to stay home all the time, and I hope that this post was a reprieve from the heavy stuff going on in the world. Please let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to write about as I work to revamp this space and share my thoughts here each week. Stay home and stay healthy!
