Three more beautiful things from the past week:

1. Sometimes I read as I walk the two-and-a-half miles home from work. As I got close to home earlier this week, a girl approaching me from the opposite direction thoughtfully warned me of something on the sidewalk I wouldn’t have wanted to step on.

2. Last night, because I was heading to a meeting instead of home after work, I took a walking route I’d never used before. It was filled with wonders, like a fat cat poised on front steps, a well-tended Victorian home tucked between two ten-story apartment buildings, a Sharpei (not a Sharpie, as I originally typed) peeking out from behind a shop-to-be’s newspapered window, a man pulling seven-foot-high weeds out of his front yard, and a British telephone box in a backyard. The people were all very friendly along the route, too, calling out greetings to my smiles, despite my headphones.

3. We brought a four-foot-high bookshelf back with us from Connecticut last week and have stationed it next to the window. It needs to have little footie things put on it before I can fill it up with books and such, so it remains empty at the moment. Jeremiah thinks it’s wonderful we’ve brought him a new jungle gym and revels in seeing which shelf he can jump onto from a sprint, tormenting anyone who climbs onto a different shelf while he’s there, and chasing his tail — both in circles and by draping himself over the shelf to grab at his tail draped down between the shelf and the wall. I find him endlessly fascinating and will be sorry to curtail his antics by filling the shelves.