Smile -- It's Saturday!

Good Shabbos [SHAH-bes] and Shabbat Shalom [shah-BAHT shah-LOAM], everyone! In other words, have a good and peaceful Sabbath whether it's today or tomorrow. And enjoy your Saturday, simply because it's Saturday ... :)

Rachel, at Diary of a Chocoholic, is once again collecting stories of what has made us smile this week. So, let's get started, shall we?

1. A fabulous Thai dinner with Tom, which is a planned post if I can find time to write it up.

2. An excellent dinner with very dear friends Art and Mary Schuman, whose gallery exhibit "Colors of Summer" I'd attended several weeks ago. Another planned post.

3. Time to make really nice lunches each morning before work: some Italian quesadillas (yet another future post), curried vegetables with the Masala Naan I'd bought at Trader Joe's recently, a salad from my garden featuring tomatoes and cucumbers and homemade pesto.

4. An opportunity to bake Chocolate-Drizzled Apricot Thumbprint cookies to share with loved ones and to bring in to work. Baking makes me happy ... :)

5. An exceptional Middle Eastern dinner at Zamaan Cafe with Jeremy and Tom, which will be posted on AnnArbor.com on August 19. (I write once-a-week for them, though I've been negligent of late with too little time at my disposal, and a different post will go up this Thursday.) This also allowed me to check off one more item on my list of 30 things I'd vowed to do this Summer -- yay!!!

6. Receiving lots of wonderful, supportive, encouraging, flattering remarks from my cyber-loved ones, whether in comments or in posts ... thank you, one and all!

7. Jeremy rearranging the furniture -- a tendency of his -- and cleaning up lots of clutter in the process. The house looks so much more open and roomy now!

8. Shopping at a new farmers' market in town. It was very small -- 4 vendors -- so it needed lots of encouragement. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming! I'll be writing about it in this week's AnnArbor.com post, going up on Thursday morning. While I was there, I bought all the ingredients to make my ratatouille ... yup, another planned post when I can find some time to both cook and write (perhaps in another lifetime???).

9. A very good friend of mine, who is very elderly and frail -- though with one of the strongest spirits I've ever known -- making me smile when she said: "I won't admit this to very many people, but I'm an old lady!" She is only old physically, but not in any other way! I want to be as vibrant and as busy and as useful as she is when I'm 86!

10. Making apricot jam, which I then used in making the cookies mentioned in #4.