On Saturday, as the rain fell in buckets from the pregnant gray sky, I was asked: "What do you dream of doing on a rainy day?"

Blogger Keri Smith has come up with a pretty good list of almost 100 creative ideas. Here are some more of my own:

Invent a dessert. I made an angel food cake with pears, mango, and chocolate.
Splash in a puddle. Then write a poem about wet feet.
Clean out your backpack, wallet, or pockets. Stick all the scraps of paper you find into a blank notebook, and make a word collage of your recent trails.
Listen to your favorite song. Then write your own, using one of the lines you like best.
Play Scrabble in a foreign language. It's not as difficult as you think. A lot of words in English are borrowed from other languages. 

The forecast calls for rain for the rest of this week and the Farmer's Almanac says it's going to be a long, cold winter.  Guess I'll just keep working my way down my own list - and adding to it! Any suggestions?

In the Mindstretch section of READ Magazine--Issue 3, we started a joke that goes a little something like this:

Three men are stranded on an island. They find a genie living in a conch shell. He grants each of them one wish. The first man says, "I want to go home." POOF! He is gone. The second man says, "I want to go home." POOF! He is gone. The third man looks around and says ...

What does he say?!? Well, the original punchline was that the third man says, "Gee I miss my friends. I wish they were here." Ba dum chhhh.

Well, that was pretty corny. The following punchlines are much better and they come straight from you, our READers!

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection was released yesterday. I'm not going to buy it. I would (even though the price is just shy of $100), but I already have all the comic books so buying this new set would merely be an act of reckless spending. But oh how I want it.

OH!

I walked into my favorite little bookstore yesterday (in Mystic, Conn.), and instantly got that old familiar feeling. That “kid-in-a-candy store” feeling. That “Christmas morning” feeling. The tingly anticipation of treasure to be discovered.

We often have moments where big questions about life and the way the world operates cross our mind. I know, I do. But what do we really do with those questions? File them in the back of our minds--or put them on the back burner? Well, I do (most of the time!). That's why I like Malcolm Gladwell - he takes those questions and goes out looking for answers.

Writer, hipster, and intellectural, Gladwell, 42, has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1996, but most of us didn't know about him until his bestselling book "The Tipping Point" hit the stands. It asks the simple yet probing question: What makes some ideas stick and spread like wildfire while other ideas fall flat on their face?

Last Saturday, I had a chance to go hear Gladwell speak at the New Yorker Festival. It was amazing.