STRICTLY POSITIVE

Friday can never get here soon enough, can it? This week seems to have been a particularly negative one media-wise. I am so not looking forward to this race to the election. It's starting way too soon and with way too many negative messages. But this is a positive post, so here are a few good things that have come my way recently that I hope make the end of your week a little better as well.

Exhibit A:  Tatiana lost her sight at 17. When she went in for an ultrasound of her soon-to-be-born son, Murilo, her doctors surprised her with a 3D printing of the results so she could feel her baby's face. Pretty cool. If you want to see a whole video, it's here (it is an ad for Huggies, apparently, but what the hell). A much better use for 3D printing than firearms, in my book.

Exhibit B:  After watching a caretaker bottle-feed and care for three baby tigers, a male orangutan has taken over, cuddling with them and feeding them their bottles of milk. The entire photo gallery is here, along with a video. I tried to attach "a few favorites" and finally had to stop downloading. They're all so precious.

This one just does me in:

Exhibit C:  In an effort to highlight more people doing nice things (it's easy to find animals doing nice things), here is a whole senior class doing it right. Their principal, Courtney Vashaw, is battling a rare form of cancer. Her students think so much of her (no mean feat for a principal) they have cancelled their senior class trip and surprised her with the funds, all $8,000 of it, to use for her medical bills. Says Vashaw: "I feel like this has been a beautiful experience as an educator,..You work so hard to try and help cultivate not only academically astute young people but kids who care. I am just so impressed and so proud of these kids for being the embodiment of that." Me, too, Principal Vashaw, me, too. (Thanks to Elizabeth for passing this great story on for the post.)

Exhibit D:  I love this video of two baby foxes playing with a ball they found in a backyard:



Exhibit E: Then there's this video of JD (grandson of Secretariat!) blowing out his birthday candles:



Thanks to Twisted Sifter for sending these my way.

Exhibit F:  This is some creative artwork done with only nails and thread. Ukrainian artist Zenyk Palagniuk used 15 miles of thread wrapped about 13,000 nails to create this portrait, which took over 200 hours. I'm a jerk, but I had to laugh (just a teensy bit) because I had no clue this was supposed to be Justin Timberlake, It's amazing nonetheless. (Is it just me, though? Did anyone see JT in there before I mentioned him? Or after?):

Exhibit G (for Goat, get it? Actually, this was purely accidental this week) : Goat vine. I think we've seen this baby goat before, but this is a different part of the clip (at least to me, and who can get tired of re-watching goat vines anyway?):



Oligatories: B's cousin B (Beckett, 5 months old) came for a visit this past weekend. Little B has a shit-ton of energy and can jump and run like the wind. They had a blast and were hysterical to watch. I made the mistake of getting on the floor with them and immediately became home base. Don't worry, it's just a flesh wound:



Stand-off:

This is Big B as Little B got ready to go home:

This is Big B two minutes after the door hit Little B on the way out:

TGIF, y'all.