I spent $26 at Goodwill this afternoon, and I feel great.

I love shopping at Goodwill. It makes me feel lucky, and smart, and frugal.

I passed Goodwill as I was walking home from the library. I'd been thinking about getting some new (well, new to me) jeans and a sweatshirt or two if I could find one, so I thought I'd go in to see what they had.

What they had was a sale. Every single piece of clothing in the store was just $2.

A post on Metafilter about the Tokyo National Museum inspired me to visit museum web sites on Mondays and write about them. I am repeatedly awed by the wealth of beautiful images and edifying information provided by museums around the world, and I hope this project will spur me to visit explore the web sites and learn new things.

I love cheap books. I go to thrift stores and library book sales and come home with boxes full of books I have no room for. Half my books (honestly, well over half my books) are in storage, waiting for me to bring them back home where I can read them.

And yet, I'm surrounded by books.

I daydream about reading all these wonderful books. I take small paperbacks to the bus stop with me - Teach Yourself French, A Brief History of Japan, The Portable Greek Historians.

I had the great pleasure of seeing and hearing Alisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan perform at Herbst Theatre on Thursday night.

My current approach to studying French is to make my way through some popular literature, picking up vocabulary words along the way.

I've found a number of Jules Verne works at Project Gutenberg, many available in both French and English. (I've seen several posts on one of the learning language forums reporting good results from reading a book in English and then in the original language. So far, I'm starting with the French, but I may change my mind.)

I decided to start with Around the World in 80 Days.

The Admin Menu module is one of the first contributed modules I install whenever I set up a Drupal site. I don't know how I ever lived without it.

It adds a simple, small (but complete!) set of menus to the top of each page in your site - visible only to administrators (or whichever roles you've given permission). It makes it incredibly easy to add new content, check your logs, and update module settings.

Unlike some menu modules, it's very responsive - downright zippy, in fact.

I'm reading my way through John McPhee's books in order (having taken a few detours), but I'm writing about this one out of order because it's an Interlibrary Loan book and it has to go back this week.

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed was a fascinating study of the creation and testing of a prototype airship in the early 1970s.

I've been listening more and more to Pandora, the online music site that lets you define your own radio stations.

San Francisco has a composting program, but I could never tell the criteria for getting a compost bin set up in apartment buildings.

As of this week, to my utter delight, there's a compost collection bin in the garbage room and a fabulous little breadbox-sized box in the apartment.

The garbage company thoughtfully provided a starter box of biodegradable plastic bags to line it.

Having a few days off around the 4th has really been a treat.

Yesterday, feeling like I had a bit of spare time to spend on something I'd enjoy, I sat down to restring my acoustic guitar.