I promised myself that I wouldn’t start this week with another weak salute to my hatred of Mondays. I mean, what’s more banal than hating on Mondays? Seriously. Welcome to my boring.

But then I woke up this morning – and by ‘woke’ I mean, got out of bed after not having slept a wink – and my inbox was full of wondrous and terrifying things and really, how is one supposed to rally one’s creative energies to write meaningful, thought-provoking prose when one is confronted by e-mail from one’s mother with the subject heading GRANDMA AND VIBRATOR?

1) My mother’s newfound enthusiasm for blogging is starting to frighten me. Because, you know, it’s not bad enough that she reveals unflattering details about the little tyrant that I was when I was five. She also has to send me e-mails with video about grannies and vibrators (VIBRATORS) and say can I post video on my blog? Because I have a story to go along with this!

Which, upon reading, caused my inner child to curl up into a little ball and weep.

2) Sometimes, you find stuff laying on the ground in your local schoolyard and despite the fact that that stuff almost certainly has grotty, grotty teenager germs – and god knows what else – all over it you simply can’t not pick it up. And photograph it. And upload it to your Flickr account.

3) Speaking of awesome: if you want awesome for your blog, you need to check this out. SWEET.

4) Speaking of more awesome: this post? Is – alongside the Shakesville post that inspired it – BlogHer’s BlogHer Of The Week post. Which is awesome not because I am awesome (although I am that, sometimes), but because that post was the catalyst for the most community-affirming discussion about reproductive choice that I have ever seen, anywhere. Pro-choice, pro-life: it didn’t matter. Every commenter was respectful, even kind, in considering both my thoughts on the subject and the thoughts of all the other commenters. It provided indisputable proof that discussion on controversial topics needn’t be combative. It demonstrated that this community really understands civil discourse. It made a lot of the residual ill-feeling from that other controversy just melt away.

It was – what’s the word? – awesome.

5) What is not so awesome: my custodianship of the Basement. I recently discovered a batch of submissions from December that I missed and therefore didn’t post. AM SO SORRY. I need to learn how to use spreadsheets or something because, really, my lack of life skills sometimes gets in the way of being awesome (or, in the case of the Basement, providing a space for others to be awesome.) Also, I suck.

(They’re all going up this week. And next. Daily posting until we get caught up.)

6) What is always awesome: UNICORNS.