While I have a traditional weekday work schedule, Rudi’s current job has him working Tuesday-Saturday, which means we don’t get much of a chance to hang out. So we decided late in the week to see if I could get today off in order for us to head to the beach.

Friday night we went to one of the nearby parks for their final Friday night outside movie — Black Panther.

Saturday was filled with my normal weekend activities — pool, garden, laundry, cleaning. After a trip out to catch the last of the sun, we came home to have tacos for supper and watch a film on Netflix. I offered Rudi the choice of two literary adaptations — The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. He picked the latter and we agreed that it was absolutely adorable.

Sunday morning, Rudi went for a bike ride and I went to the farmers market. Then we headed to Delaware to catch Mamma Mia 2 at the old single screen movie house near our favorite beach town, stopping for ice cream at a farm stand along the way. We concluded the evening at a brew house in Rehoboth, where we ate fish tacos, drank beer (mine was of the root variety), and played a game of giant Connect Four.

This morning, we headed to the beach, expecting the low clouds to burn off by noon as the forecast had promised. Apparently Mother Nature doesn’t pay attention to the weather forecast, because the clouds hung around until nearly 5, even occasionally dripping slightly on us. The water was rough and with most of us who were without boogie boards opting to splash, rather than swim. We saw two swimmers need to be rescued from the rip tides by lifeguards, after being unable to explain that you need to swim parallel to the shore, rather than trying to swim toward it in that situation. (I imagine even if you knew that information, your panicking brain could chase it from your memory as you realize you aren’t making progress, but are getting more and more tired trying.)

The sun emerged briefly just before 5, but was chased back behind clouds for another hour or so, by which time I’d given up on being chilly and damp and had changed out of my bathing suit. We ate the drippiest ice cream cones ever and did a little shopping and then headed home, tired but happy.

If it’s Thursday, it’s time to reflect back on three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Late Monday evening’s downpour was followed by a brief clearing, just long enough to cause an enormous rainbow to fill the eastern sky. I have never seen a rainbow that big — so large, in fact, that I had to use the panorama setting on my phone to capture both ends of it (and that was without the outer double rainbow). It was so impressive, I made Rudi pull the car over so we could capture it.

2. Tuesday night, we had tickets to the Mets-Nationals baseball game. Unfortunately, the Mets played a losing game of football, giving up 7 runs in the first inning and then several innings of three runs apiece. By the time the eighth inning came around, they were six pitchers and nearly 20 runs in the hole. What do you do in that situation? Why turn to your 35-year-old bench-warming, veteran shortstop, of course! That’s right, the Mets put José Reyes on the mound as their final pitcher of the night, where he flung nearly 50 pitches over the plate at speeds ranging from 57 mph (which tapped Ryan Zimmerman on the leg, who grinningly responded by pretending to charge the mound) to a respectable 87 mph. Sure, he gave up six more runs to make the evening the worst loss in Mets history (and ended his pitching debut with an ERA of 54.0 (still vastly better than the ERA of 135.0 he held for a little while)), but he made it a night no one who stuck around to the end of the game will ever forget.

3. San Francisco’s fog is world-renowned (also, it’s named Karl), so I wasn’t shocked to see the Golden Gate Bridge socked in on Friday. It was a little more surprising to watch disembodied wisps of it float through the trees in a park where I was walking the next afternoon, but it was also kind of cool.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Here are a few shots from my San Francisco trip last week:

Finally, a few murals from Hayes Valley, the neighborhood where I was staying:

I’ll show you some photos of my time in San Francisco tomorrow, when I’m a little more awake. But tonight I thought I’d share what I splurged and brought home from the course of my vacation day, when I stopped at two indie bookshops and two local record stores:

First the music: I bought two used cds (I still prefer cds): Holly Near’s and still we sing, a two-disc set, and Woody Guthrie at 100! Live at the Kennedy Center, a cd/dvd tribute concert. It includes performances from a variety of luminaries including Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash, Donovan, Judy Collins, and Sweet Honey in the Rock.

The books include a signed copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark; a collection of poems & short prose pieces about San Francisco gentrification by Tony Robles, Cool Don’t Live Here No More; and two novels in translation, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat and Juan Villoro’s middle-grade The Wild Book, about a boy who turns out to be a magical reader (which I already started on the flight home).

Oh, and one more thing — I bought a tote bag to hold all my purchases with the cool cat as record player design.

I didn’t mean to buy quite so much, but I decided music and books were a good splurge.

I’d expected free wi-fi time on my red-eye flight, but couldn’t get it to work, so you’re getting a shot of a Chicago sunrise instead that I’m posting as we load our flight to National.

Home in a couple of hours. I can’t wait!

I spent today working, so here’s a shot from my plane window yesterday looking over the western coast of Florida.