delights

Linguno has been my favorite language learning website for a while now.

For the longest time, I really only paid attention to the excellent verb practice exercises.

Recently, though, I ran out of other online games to play and tried one of the Linguno crosswords. I don't think I had realized that they offer lots of monolingual crosswords - with the clues in the language you're practicing - but I was immediately delighted. I am repeatedly amazed at how well those relatively simple phrases in the practice language reinforce and expand my understanding.

I hope everybody in the world knows about Merlin, the amazing free app that helps identify birds by sound or photos. I've had Merlin for years, and I love it.

There was a terrific post on Metafilter about the On Verticality blog:  On Verticality "explores the innate human need to escape the surface of the earth, and our struggles to do so throughout history."

In the comments, a couple of folks mentioned Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, which I'd never heard of before.

What a magical flock of ideas fluttered in my mind at that phrase.

Over at MetaFilter, there was a great thread about microwaves (and particularly about the book Microwave Cooking for One and a very funny blog post about it, My journey to the microwave alternate timeline).

I immediately thought of the microwave we had when I was a kid - and then I saw this comment:

I came across a photo of a dugong this week and thought it looked a lot like a manatee, so, during a brief break between work things, I looked up dugongs and manatees in hopes of finding out the difference.

The first page I found was this splendid page about Manatees and Dugongs at the Marine Mammal Center - it filled me with delight with its gorgeous pictures of these wonderful creatures.

I am usually terrible about taking time off for the holidays. I made an effort, this year, to take at least a few days to be as relaxed and task-free as possible.

I wanted to make some space for woolgathering, reflection, laughter, for time to sink into a sense of free time. I wanted to enjoy some things I don't manage to enjoy as often as I'd like, foods I like to eat, things I like to do.

I like to do creative things - write, draw, make music - and I wanted the space to feel like I could do those things - for fun, not as a task on a checklist. 

I like games, but I hardly ever play them. I've been ridiculously busy with work for a few years now so it's hard to find the time, and I'm still being very cautious about COVID so I don't spend time with friends, so I mostly sneak in an occasional game of Freecell and do a crossword puzzle every so often and that's about it.

Around this time last year I came across this great thread on Ask MetaFilter: Hobbies for the Lazy. The person asked about low-key hobbies, since they were feeling burned out and their current hobbies - gardening, baking, and running - were starting to feel like work.

I loved the suggestions in the thread, and it feels good to revisit it now (it's been in my bookmarks forever, and in my scratch pad here on the blog).

There are so many amazing resources on the internet; somehow, every time I come across another one, I'm surprised and delighted all over again.

Over on Ask MetaFilter, someone was asking about filmed versions of Macbeth, and one of my favorite folks at MetaFilter, The Wrong Kind of Cheese, posted a great answer:

I was letting my random iTunes playlist randomly pick songs for me, as I like to do, and suddenly I heard a Barenaked Ladies song I'd never heard before: "Conventioneers."

(It's not that uncommon for me to get a great new CD and copy it into iTunes and then not actually listen to the whole thing, instead just waiting for songs to turn up in my playlist.)