The Weekly Wrap: June 6, 2021

When I travelled in high school and college, I had this habit of buying lots and lots of postcards. I did that because I knew that I could never take pictures of attractions and the sights as good as a professional. (This was before I got a digital camera. Why waste film?) My intent was to glue these postcards into scrapbooks alongside the photos I did take. For some reason, I always ended up buying WAY more postcards than I would ever actually use in these scrapbooks. Heck, some trips never even got to the scrapbook stage.

One of my pandemic projects was digitizing all of my print scrapbooks and photos. First, I scanned the existing scrapbooks as whole items. Then, I removed all the pictures and scanned them as individual items. We're short on storage so I opted to dismantle the scrapbooks and just keep the pictures. They now reside in a preservation quality box... cause I'm a librarian like that.

While working on this project, I found a veritable bounty of unused postcards. They were from France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy - so much Italy. Not wanting to throw them away, I decided to use them. I love sending snail mail to people. This was a little thing I could do to stay connected. I wrote out a quick message, slapped on a postcard stamped, and mailed out a bunch of happy mail.

I hope the recipients enjoyed getting the postcards as much as I loved sending them. 

What was the last piece of happy mail you sent?

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• How library holds tell you about community. [Book Riot]
• I love a good grocery store bouquet. Here are some tips for picking up flowers from a grocery florist. [The Kitchn]
• Renaming coronavirus variants to be less stigmatizing. [WaPo]]
• Smaller packages but not smaller prices. We are in shrinkflation. [WaPo]
• Study Web is a lifeline for students. [Every]
• This mother and daughter are getting really creative with cicadas. [WaPo]
• What we learned from Dr. Fauci's emails may cause you to like him even more. [CNN]
• Legos can get really tall. [The Oatmeal]
• Donut or doughnut? [NPR]

• The Clinch: A look at romance novel covers. [99% Invisible]
• The story and history in our genes. [Short Wave]
• How to get started with biking. [Life Kit]
• How the Supreme Court became supreme. [Throughline]

• More then you ever wanted to know about armoring women... but you will be so glad you watched the full video. [Jill Bearup]
• I'm a big fan of cake decorating videos and this TikTok of a tall, spiral geode cake is mesmerizing. [The Sweet Impact]
• We started watching Shadow and Bone. If it weren't for the fact that we have to get up in  the morning on a toddler's schedule, I'm fairly certain we would have binged the entire season in two nights. It's totally absorbing and the world building is excellent. I am now debating if it's worth reading the books before the entire series run is done. [Netflix]

• Our bulk order of cascatelli arrived and I finally got a chance to try it out. I made this slow cooker bolognese as our first sauce. The pasta shape has superb toothsinkability and forkability. Saucability was good but not great with the chunky sauce. The toddler approved the shape for its grabability and dissectability. She loved ripping the ruffles off and then eating them. As for the sauce itself. It was fine. I was lazy and skipped the vegetable pre-cooking step which might have changed the flavor. I also doubled the spices and added loads more garlic. Who actually follows the recipe when it comes to garlic?

• This week, I finally got around to updating the Presentations & Publications page on my website. It had been years since I last did that. (Oops.) Updating didn't take that long, but it felt good to see all the things I've accomplished. I highly recommend sitting down one day and just writing out all your wins, stuff you've finished, or projects you've completed. It's a great mood booster.