cellio | serendipity

We received a beautiful and serendipitous gift today for our 20th wedding anniversary (which was a couple weeks ago, but shipping is more complicated during a pandemic). The serendipity requires backstory:

A few years ago, in a year of big design changes, Stack Overflow had a contest with SO-branded cheese boards as prizes. I won one. Recently I've been divesting myself of some of my SO swag and packing most of the rest away, because of the pain and also because I'm not very interested in promoting that company by, say, wearing those t-shirts in public any more.

I offered some of my Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange swag to folks on Mi Yodeya, with the price being a torah teaching of the recipient's choice. I got some thoughtful torah, and a taker for the cheese board. I sent it off to its new home a couple months ago.

We eat cheese not infrequently, by the way.

And then today, somebody who knows nothing of Stack Overflow, recent events there, or swag, sent us this:

It's beautiful and well-crafted, and I look forward to using it with much fondness. Yay, 20 years of marriage! Yay, nice gift from someone who didn't about the extra niceness!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

juan_gandhi

Impressive. I wonder if French cheese is still available these days.

cellio

I don't have a good sense of cheese supply lines. Some things are definitely disrupted but I haven't looked for a pattern. Things at the store just seem erratic now -- but is that issues with *distribution* or *production*?

hudebnik

We acquired a similar cheese board, with the same set of knives but without the pull-out drawer to store them, some years ago. I have no idea where the board is now, but we use the knives (especially the broad one) routinely for things other than cheese, like brownies.

The direct storage is really useful. In the past we have gotten both boards and utensils, but they tend to become separated. Thanks for the tip about brownies -- that *would* work better than spatulas!