Body-text fonts, pt. 48: Simoncini Garamond

Perhaps my favorite Garamond. The happy average of Garamonds “Monotype” and “ITC”: not too twiggy, not too fat. Spiky serifs; short descenders.

Sample 1: Mary Westmacott, i.e. Agatha Christie, Absent in the Spring (in an omnibus):

Sample 2: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed:

If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what would.

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Happy Paw Patrol-themed birthday, yesterday, to Daniel. We invited his cousins over to help him to empty his piñata.

It has become customary among our families to offer a piñata whenever a child turns a year older. Our boys had accumulated enough candy to fill a kitchen cabinet. So, we recycled as much of it as we could into yesterday’s piñata.

We told the other parents to put their children’s gleanings into the next piñata, then into the next one, and so on.

Nickel and dimed

At church, a nice old lady took me aside and gave me an envelope. “Don’t let your wife know about this,” she said.

The envelope contained a Valentine’s Day card and $25.

“Take your wife out for a nice meal,” the card said.

So I did, at the local Vietnamese restaurant, on Monday. (We figured we’d beat the rush.) Our nice meal consisted of a bowl of rice noodles, herbs, meats on a stick, and assorted flavors. It was exceedingly pleasant, except that the server kept telling us how good our food was while we were trying to eat it.

And she said I couldn’t order a sandwich because the nail parlor had been ordering ten sandwiches at a time, and the restaurant had run out.

She also hung around and talked about how beautiful Vanna White still is after all these years. I’m not sure why she said this. Wheel of Fortune wasn’t on TV in the restaurant.

It was a little kooky, not unlike the last time when we were in that restaurant and she attended to us very professionally until the last minute, when she told us that she was desperate to quit her job. But, as of Monday night, she hadn’t.

Karin thought the server was kooky, too, but she may have harbored some sympathy for her; afterward, when we went to the used-DVD store, she bought the movie Waitress.

I bought Pale Rider.