Hello, weekend! My family gave me an easel and some paints for Mother's Day and I'm hoping to use part of my weekend to try some baby steps (and I do mean jerky, toddling, off-balance baby steps) toward releasing my inner painter. Here's one inspiration that makes me happy:

Ready for some gems for the weekend? Here you go:

• An interesting and sometimes heartbreaking tale of two schools from the NY Times magazine.
   
• Just in time: 22 official rules for calling "shotgun." You're welcome. I think. Or I'm sorry?
   
• Say yes to some raspberry swirl buttermilk pancakes this weekend. I can hardly handle how delicious these look:

• This week the Hollywood Reporter's uncensored oral history of the West Wing filled a need I didn't even know I had. And now I need to go back and rewatch it, especially Season 2.
   
• Three cheers for Elin Nordegren's speech as the outstanding graduating senior of her college. You may remember she was yanked into the limelight several years ago when her marriage to Tiger Woods blew up publicly. More importantly, after nine years of incremental work, she has graduated from college while raising two children with a 3.96 GPA in a language not her native one (thanks, Therese):

• I loved this interview with Anna Quindlen by Gretchen Rubin, especially this quote: "I have a picket fence of habits to keep me on track."
   
• Did you see this video by Maria Shriver celebrating her mother? I love the message that we all mother in different ways--and that's okay. In fact, it's empowering and essential. I also love her mother's mantra to her: "you can, you must, you will. Just go do it."

• Grandma Gatewood's walk. Longreads gives us a glimpse of the first woman who walked the Appalachian Trail. In Keds. At age 67. I love stories like this; they give me that it's-never-too-late-to-follow-your-dreams feeling.
   

• Speaking of that, I LOVED Anne Lamott's facebook post last weekend.  This spoke to me: "...What if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen."

How about we start by having a big juicy creative weekend full of imagination and radical silliness? Ready, set, go.