The Megastore recommends.

your mileage may vary.

1. Monday. Hear me out. Or rather, hear my stipulations. A Monday, in the summer, late July, when your daughter's visiting, and Tuesday, the next day, is a holiday. Monday? Under those conditions, not so bad, truthfully. Especially if your Monday contains...

Not my movie theater.

2. An  afternoon movie. One especially superb thing about my daughter being here is that she is willing, totally totally willing, to support me in my "see all the movies" quest. Today we saw Moonrise Kingdom. It's true, I saw this movie before, but it was on the day following the Great Popcorn Overeating of 2012, which meant I had had very little sleep the night before, which means I suspected that I perhaps missed a fair amount of the movie, a suspicion that was borne out upon reviewing the movie today. I liked it quite a bit more and it felt more complete, more fully itself. No popcorn, which added to the quality of the event. Plus, we had french fries on the way home. Just a few. And they were really good.

Not my family.

3. Family dinner. Add a family dinner to your Monday, and your Monday automatically gets fuller of fun. I am getting better at designing a dinner that won't defeat me, and will instead leave me capable of playing with the grandchildren, rather than staying in the kitchen finishing fancy dish 15, 16, and 17 while everyone else is having fun. So: I made some chicken on skewers with lots of chopped herbs and garlic, roasted green beans, and...wait for it...fattoush. Also watermelon. AND I baked a cake. I could have made it harder on myself by making cupcakes, or a layer cake, but I just made it an oblong and saved myself a little grief. It was a cocoa buttermilk cake, from Dorie Greenspan, with a vanilla buttercream icing. It was good, everyone concurred.

The actual Cake Boss.

4. Cake Boss. "What comes after cake?" my grandson asked tonight, after having delicately mangled the icing on his piece of cake while leaving the cake itself intact. He's not much of a cake fan, which...how did that happen? But I digress. What comes after cake is Cake Boss. Or at least that's the way I ended my day. In fact, I am blogging while watching it--as we speak, as it were. My daughter is having a hilarious obsession with this show--she's the one who got me to watch it. Tonight, the episode we're watching (Netflix, bien sur!) has both an 80s cake, and a key to the city cake. Bada bing bada boom! Right now they're making all sorts of little figures out of modeling chocolate--it's a thing, apparently.