Three mild, sunny days stretch before me, nearly epic in their length. We kicked it off well tonight, with an evening viewing of Into Darkness. Here are 15 more things I’m hoping to do while Rudi is off on his weekend-long bike trip:

1. Finish a knitting project or two.
2. Send some mail.
3. Read a book or three.
4. Visit the garden.
5. Look for ducklings.
6. Go for a bike ride.
7. Take a yoga class.
8. Shop at the farmers market.
9. If my friends are in town, meet them at the playground.
10. Drink tea outside.
11. Do laundry.
12. Mop the bathroom floor.
13. Head up to Politics & Prose for trivia night.
14. Put away the Christmas dvds (which have been sitting on a cabinet since December).
15. Call a friend.

How about you? What’s on your agenda for the long weekend?

Hey there! It’s Thursday night and the rain has finally arrived, after meteorologists having promised some for three days now. That means it’s a perfect time to look back at three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I suggested to Rudi that I might like to go up to Politics & Prose tonight because Eliot Schrefer, whose Endangered was one of my favorite books last year, was doing a reading. [More on the event over the weekend.] He offered to accompany me, so we followed up the bookstore visit with pizza at the Tenleytown outlet of Pete’s and ice cream cones from Max’s.

2. I have not been a huge fan of The Office, because I didn’t particularly enjoy the breakdown of the 4th wall (and, yes, I understand the show’s premise). But Rudi does and we have watched quite a bit of the show’s final season, allowing me enough fondness for it to want it to end well for all the characters. Last week’s feel-good finale wrapped things up in just the way I would have hoped.

3. The first strawberry crop of the season are three small, delicious, red berries.

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

I haven’t been so good about posting non-Thursday entries for a while now. Some of it’s been event-related stress, much of which is now past or, at least, de-escalated. Some of it’s been tiredness and malaise and depression. But generally it’s been all-encompassing, not just here on the blog.

This week, though, maybe things are a little lighter. I read a couple of books. I called a friend. I started thinking about where I want my life to go next from here and how I might find myself there. And I’ve knit a bit. So I thought I might also write a little something here.

I don’t have any answers yet. And maybe there are no answers. Maybe there’s just putting one foot in front of the other and moving in one direction or another. Maybe any direction is just as good as the rest, as long as you’re moving. Treading water may be fine if you’re stuck in the middle of the ocean, but just staying afloat is no way to live a life if at the end of it you’re not going to be filled with regrets. And if making no moves is going to lead to that, then it’s the same as actively choosing disappointment.

I reject that choice.

So instead I choose motion. I opt to creep — slowly if need be — away from stasis. I will crawl, walk, hop, scramble my way from would-haves and should-haves. And if I encounter a dead end, which I will most certainly do at some point, I will inch, skip, run, twirl in some other direction.

I am done waiting. Life, I’m on the move.

I am bone tired, but I still have a heap of dishes to wash, so this will be a quick list of three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi and I head out on our bikes along the C&O Canal towpath, hoping to see ducklings. We see some, as well as three families of goslings in various states of growth.

2. Saturday was E.U. Day, so many of the union’s members held open houses at their embassies to celebrate. We stopped by Austria for drinks, by Slovakia for food and folk dancing, and by Hungary to see a dog.

3. Rudi obligingly had a round birthday today, so I decided to mark it by throwing him a surprise party. Friends from all aspects of our D.C. lives came together in uncommunicativeness so that when he walked into the room, he really was surprised.

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

Posting slacks off when life gets a little crazy. It should calm down some next week, so hopefully I’ll sit down at the home keyboard a bit more often. However, it’s Thursday, and we try never to miss a Thursday (even if on the rare occasion it must be marked on a Friday instead). Here, to celebrate this week’s, are three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Howard County was filled with fields like this:

2. A dapper, bearded older man rounds the corner. He’s dressed in a three-piece pin-stripe suit, with a tall bowler hat on his head and a walking stick topped with a silver lion in his hand.

3. A half-dozen men in their 20s are outside the fence playing a spirited game of cricket, with a deflated orange traffic cone as one of the wickets. I don’t understand the game, but they declare me an honorary player when I track down and retrieve for them the ball they inadvertently hit into the garden. (If I hadn’t been pressed for time, I would have stayed to watch for a longer while.)

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. There’s a single cupcake left at the software training.

2. The first strawberries of the season at today’s farmers market.

3. A nice weekend visiting my family includes pool, vegetarian dinners, and lunch and milkshakes with Karen.

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