Get lost in all the little things.

I've been spending a lot of time lately vacation planning. Road trip planning, really. Discovering places to see, places to stay, that sort of thing. Roadtrippers.com is a pretty cool website to help plan destinations. I've got about three different road trips somewhat-mapped out on there right now. It's been a cool site to work with for a bit. They send you e-mails about trip ideas, but usually they're focused on California or the NE, neither of which fall into the category of 'Rad Weekend Roadtrips' if you live in the middle of the country.

Earlier today I was at Barnes & Noble trying to decide whether or not to buy a book and started shelf browsing through the history area, which ended up becoming the music section and the society section, or something like that. It had memoirs of celebrities, but also it had the Postsecret books. I think I've mentioned that a personal hope of mine has been to randomly find a secret or something stuck inside a Postsecret book in a bookstore. People tend to do that with those books and so whenever I see one on a bookstore shelf, I flip through them to see if anybody left any secret or anything in the book for another stranger to find. And today, it happened! Someone left this (not so much secret as much as note of encouragement from a stranger) in one of the Postsecret books in the Columbia Barnes & Noble and now I have it, stuck to my fridge:

I was pretty excited when I found it. I love stuff like this. Back when I used to pick up stones from places and paint sayings on them and leave them in random spots all over the country, I used to hope people felt a sense of excitement when they saw one. I think they must have, because I've never seen any of my rocks again. I would go back weeks later to see if they were still where I left them and they never were. Even ones that were slightly obscure in their new locations. Whoever found them, took them someplace else. It's nice to see fun, happy-go-lucky sorts of things from strangers. It helps to make someone else's day, you know? And today's note from a stranger has made my day! I ended up not buying anything at the mall today, but came away with this note and a realization that I can now say I found something a stranger shared in a book! After I found this in one of books I had to stop myself from flipping through all the other ones on the shelf to see if I could find more. But I thought that if someone had hidden something in the others, I would leave it for another person to find in case someone else has this same hidden hope of finding something in a Postsecret book someday.

Also, earlier this week I got a free download of the new full album of Green River Ordinance. This is a band that I learned about a couple of years ago through Birchbox. They shared a free download of a GRO song in one of their monthly boxes one time and I fell in love with the songs and somehow ended up on a mailing list from the band. Earlier this week they sent out an e-mail to the list with a link to download their new album, so I did. I like them a lot. Sometimes they remind me of Jimmy Eat World, if you remember them from the last decade? That's the only band that comes to mind that they remind me of. But they also have a tiny bit of a country/folk feel to some of their songs sometimes...in an instrumental way, not vocally. Anyway, here's one of their new songs that I've gotten stuck in my head: