Serendipitous Thoughts on a Friday

These are things on my mind today!

I have a new shero! (Slang Definition: a female hero who kicks ass and takes names!)


It's Dara Torres. And if you don't know that she's forty-one and swimming in the Olympics then shame on you! And, yes, that's her baby!

That takes me to how much I love the Olympics and how excited I am that they are starting today. Yeah, I know they are in China. Yes, I completely support the cause of Tibet and its people. Maybe with the world watching China and exerting a bit of peer pressure. . .



Perhaps it's naive but I also wish the Olympics were free from politics; the athletes were free from steroids; the United States were out of Iraq; politicians and religious zealots were out of my bedroom. . . I know. I know. Moving on. . .

Did you know that there's a word for the smell that comes just as it starts to rain?? I heard it on NPR. The word is petracore. Here's the definition: "More specifically, it’s the pleasant smell that often accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions. It was named by two Australian researchers in an article in Nature in 1964, who discovered that the smell is an oily essence that comes from rocks or soil that are often (but not always) clay-based. The oil is a complicated set of at least fifty different compounds, rather like a perfume. It turned out that the oils are given off by vegetation during dry spells and are adsorbed on to the surface of rocks and soil particles, to be released into the air again by the next rains." (definition comes from here)

Now, if they only had a word for the smell of a baby's head. . .

Now that everyone has learned something today – have a great weekend!