Reading: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. (Thanks to C for the loan!)

Audio: In honor of Burt Bacharach, lots of his classic tunes as recorded by Dionne Warwick, The Carpenters, et al.

Video: The latest seasons of All Creatures Great and Small and White Lotus. (There’s a contrast for you…)

Art: A small but powerful installation of large-scale photographs and related, little-seen images by Richard Avedon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tr(eats): Dinner at Joe Allen with visiting friends means one of my favorite hamburgers in NYC.

Drinks: My cocktail of choice in the 2000s was a Sidecar. I might be going back to that.

Beauty Products: A generous friend gifted me with some Surratt Beauty products, knowing how much I’d been wanting to try them and would appreciate them. So far, I’m smitten with the powder eyeshadows, the powder blush, and a “Lipslique” that might be a “holy grail” (as we used to say on the message-boards) for me.

Garb: I really need to wear my Anna Sui leopard faux-fur shrug more often, because it seems to make other people happy, too.

Pleasures:  Longer daylight hours! Friends in town. Coffee dates. Remembering how much I do like certain aspects of midtown Manhattan, even though it still hasn’t fully regained its pre-pandemic identity. Attending a fantastic tarot workshop.

Plans: Getting my tempo back on a freelance assignment that’s had me stuck for a while. (Some perfumes are less enjoyable to discuss than others, to be totally honest.)

Image: Lippincott’s February (cropped) by J. J. Gould. American, 1896. Chromolithograph.