Well, we’ll go swimmin’ every day.
No time to work, just time to play.
If your folks complain just say,
“It’s summertime!”
~Thomas Earl “Tom” Jameson of The Jamies (DJ — and later Red Sox p.a. announcer — Sherman Feller was given half of the songwriting credit per his management contract with the group.)
Rudi is off playing bicycles this weekend, leaving Corey and me home alone. Corey has informed me that while he is happy to curl up next to me at night and holler at me whenever I walk into the kitchen, probably that’s the extent of his weekend plans. I’m going to try not to make it the extent of mine.
Laundry mountain is no longer in danger of smothering me in my sleep, but probably could use further attention, particularly as I’m traveling later in the week and might like to take clean clothes. Likewise, the living room is in danger of being declared a natural disaster site and I should probably stop trying to address that by smothering it from above.
I had plans to watch Wonder Woman outdoors tonight, but the threat of thunderstorms caused them to call it early — a disappointment, since it ended up with clear skies, but understandable. Instead, I took myself to the library to collect my holds, to the garden to water, to the pool to swim, and then back home to watch the season finale of Agents of SHIELD.
I might try to get over to Virginia tomorrow night to watch Norma Rae outdoors if the weather holds and I can figure out the travel logistics with Metro and bikeshare. Or there’s also a free modern Carmen adaptation at the Kennedy Center tomorrow evening, should I want someplace less complicated to visit.
I have some job search stuff to take care of over the weekend, as always these days.
I’d like to spend some time reading and some time knitting. I need to remember to water my houseplants. And I’ll need milk at the farmers market. Rudi suggested that if there was a deal to be had on bulk tomatoes that he’d be willing to tackle turning them into sauce when he gets back to town.
And as sleep should also be something I tackle this weekend, I’ll bid you a good night!
If it’s Thursday, it’s time to think back on three beautiful things from my past week:
1. After biking back from an early morning jaunt to Virginia, I stopped in Georgetown for a bit. Their Business Improvement District, as with many neighborhoods’, has worked hard to reclaim public spaces and make them inviting. Today I noticed they’d recently added a porch-style swing to the seating along the walk by the canal. I sat there with a cup of tea, rocking slowly, watching the dragonflies and damselflies flit amongst the cattails and the water slowly meander over grasses toward the Potomac. (They’re currently overhauling the canal, so have let it go wild during the process.)
2. We got to the movies on Tuesday to catch Yesterday, about a 20-something singer of little success who, after awakening following a freak worldwide blackout and a subsequent accident to find that no one else remembers who the Beatles (among other things) were, proceeds to record the songs as his own. Himesh Patel as Jack Malik does a great job with the material and with portraying the stresses of both fraudulently representing someone else’s work as your own (Why did you write a song about the USSR, which dissolved before you were born, for instance), and of the changes to your life when you suddenly hit it big after years of getting by. The music is a standout, and Rudi and I were not the only ones to find ourselves singing along in the theater over the closing credits.
3. A neighbor on the next block had a large, diseased tree cut down last Friday. Normally, I wouldn’t say this was a positive thing, but the fact is that there was a large warren of rats living underneath its roots and I’m glad not to have to hot-foot it past in the dark any more. (Like any city girl, I can cope with rats on their own just fine — they’re way more scared of you and just want to get away — but saw way too many cartoons as a kid to be comfortable with them ganging up.)
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
My Tour de France shawl was not finished by the time the cyclists circled the Arc de Triomphe the final time, but progress does continue noticeably. It would be faster if I didn’t have to keep doing spit splices of my pink yarn. Some of the breaks were due to moth damage from a project I was working on several years ago, but I’m now also finding problems on the interior of the center pull ball, which makes me think I got it caught in the yarn winder gear, which happens periodically. It’s been probably eight years since I wound it, so I don’t have a ton of recollection about the specifics of winding it up. Either way, I’m one more repeat of the pink pattern stitch section to go before I return to more mosaic work. Keep your needles crossed for long sections of unbroken yarn.
I started Aurora Uprising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff this week. The pair wrote The Illuminae Files trilogy, my favorite y.a. space opera series in a while, and this marks the start of a new series for them. They are good at characters and pacing and plot and impending doom, and really all you’d like for a book set in space in the future. I look forward to finishing it over the weekend while Rudi’s away biking. (I also still need to finish There There, which I’ve made progress on, and Red, White, and Royal Blue, which I haven’t picked up in a couple weeks, since they’re both overdue to the library.)
As I knit, I’m listening to The Big Kahuna by Janet Evanovich and Peter Evanovich, who replaces Lee Goldberg as coauthor for the latest installment of the Fox and O’Hare heist series. The change is not to the betterment of the series, which is disappointing. The series is not great literature in the first place (although it is a lot of fun and a quick listen), and to the younger Evanovich’s credit the word “panties” has not appeared in the first two thirds of the book, which definitely beats all the previous novels in the series.
Want to see more of what people are crafting and reading? Head to As Kat Knits for the roundup!
Every summer, the National Building Museum turns the main hall of its massive Renaissance Revival-era into an interactive seasonal installation. Rudi and I have never managed to get to it, but this morning the museum waived the admission charge for residents in our ward (D.C. is divided into eight of them of roughly equal population) and we decided to check it out.
It was hard work.
While previous installations have included ball pit beaches and musical tube beehives, among others, this year the theme is Lawn.
Built onto scaffolding located between the first and third floors, the Astro-turf lawn slopes from the top, home to bean bag tosses and a “swimming pool” of sorts, to a mid-level plateau with Adirondack chairs, and down a steep hill full of children rolling and running and shouting. Dangling over the top two levels are dozens of hammocks into which the soothing stories of celebrities’ summers past are piped. Because the main hall soars four stories in the air, you manage to pick up the hint of a breeze as you lie there with your feet up and your eyes closed. Adding to the illusion of being outdoors are the ambient noises emitting around the floor — lawn mowers, crickets chirping, children shrieking from afar.
It was very well done, and I’d say that if you have a few hours to spend, it’s worth the expense, particularly if, like us, you lack your own personal lawn.
Our visit also included the cost of visiting the other exhibitions, so we took in collections about how homes have changed over the U.S.’s history, animals in architectural details, and building blocks (the National Building Museum is a family-friendly destination). My two favorites were the photo exhibition about basketball hoops around the world and how they tell a universal, yet highly local, story (note to my parents, I was not the only person to take out a garage window with a basketball) and Flickering Treasures, a story about Baltimore’s movie and neighborhood theaters through time. While 240 theaters called Maryland’s most famous city home, they are down to five currently in operation (up from three a couple years ago). It was a fascinating story about segregation, modernization, and localization (they had fewer studio-run theaters than most cities of comparable size).
Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is a freebie week, where host Jana of That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to make up our own bookish topic.
I recently finished one book that starts in Washington, D.C., and another that includes D.C. among several settings, which made me think about other books set in the area. Rather than give you a list of books set here that I’d recommend (although I’d be happy to do so if you leave a note in the comments), I thought I’d share ten books set locally that I’d like to read:
*I own a copy and have no excuse why I haven’t read it yet.
Have you read any of these books?