Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten settings we’d like to see more of in our reading. Mine are a little bit all over the place, incorporating both time and place, general and specific:

1. New England (Home!)
2. Washington, D.C. (Don’t we all want to read more books set where we live? But do it well or I’ll call you out!)
3. The beach (I’d like more of the beach in every aspect of my life.)
4. Christmas (I’m a sucker for books set at the winter holidays.)
5. Wales (A country within a country, and a beautiful one at that.)
6. The South of France (Cute villages, sunflowers, cycling, film festivals…)
7. PEI (A third of why we love Anne is the setting, right?)
8. Campgrounds (I feel like I should think about writing a mystery series set in campgrounds, but would someone keep camping after their second murder? Other than the Scooby-Doo gang, of course.)
9. Libraries/bookstores (Obviously.)
10. Valentine’s Day (Why aren’t there more romances set at this holiday? Or maybe there are and I just haven’t found them…)

How about you? Do you have settings that you prefer in your reading?

By my weekend’s to-do list, I’ve had great success. We swam, watched Endeavour before we missed out on it, saw some of the Apollo 11 festivities, and enjoyed Hamlet. I bought eggs and milk and a bag of heirloom tomatoes at the farmers market (among other things) and cat food and Oreos at the store. We watered the garden and picked everything ripe. (I’ll have to weed later in the week when the cool weather returns, since apparently weeds, like tomatoes, really enjoy heat waves.)

I ripped out the last four rows of the shawl to get back to the right number of stitches, listening to Peter Mayle’s The Vintage Caper while doing so. I am 16 rows away from finishing the first third of the shawl. I wonder how many more times I’ll have to knit them!

And I even found the title to my car, among other things.

But now the Burrow looks like it suffered through an earthquake with everything strewn about. Putting the apartment to rights will be high on this week’s to-do list when I’m not out doing other, more interesting things, like going to a baseball game and playing volleyball and enjoying a beautiful forecast. Which, honestly, possibly means the apartment is going to look a lot like this for the rest of the week. But I will at least tidy up some of the mess because two adults (and an adult cat) do live here after all.

…

Yeah, I laughed, too.

Most of you probably know today was the 50th anniversary of the first human to walk on the moon. Some of you may have seen that to celebrate the Smithsonian Institution opted to do a projection of the Apollo 11 on the Washington Monument.

I went down tonight for the last showing of the film at 11:30 p.m. and hung out with thousands of other people (late night owls unite!) to watch in the heat (the heat index was still well over 90 at that hour). Here are some of the images from the event (mouse over the image to get the controls or click on the picture to go see them larger on Flickr):

Kudos to everyone involved in the production and execution!

Honestly, my weekend plan should just be not to move any more than absolutely necessary. However, that doesn’t really seem like an enjoyable use of my weekend, so instead, I’m going to:

• Water the garden, because Mother Nature has not been helping me out.
• Buy milk and eggs at the farmers market.
• Swim, because that’s the only thing that makes sense in this crazy heat.
• Catch some of the Apollo 11 festivities down on the Mall.
• Watch The Bookshop, which I have out from the library, and the last episode from Endeavour, before it goes behind PBS’ paywall.
• Take in the final performance of Hamlet, this year’s Shakespeare Theatre’s Free for All.
• Organize the apartment.
• Purchase cat food.
• Figure out where the extra stitch came from in the latest row of my shawl.
• Start reading There There or, conversely, finish one of the many books I’m already partway through.

How about you? what are you going to do this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Fort Reno concerts started back up last week, which seems fitting because it’s impossible not to equate heat waves and the free local series, now in its 51st year, held at the highest point in the District, where even on the most miserable evening, it feels like a slight breeze gives you some relief. We introduced our new friends to the concerts and they are excited to share the experience with their teenaged nephews when they come for a prolonged visit in a few weeks.

2. Every year, the Fort Reno organizers designate one of its evenings as the Night of a Thousand Cakes in memory of the late local musician John Stabb’s birthday. Attendees bring cakes and other goodies to share, and I’ve been lucky enough to make the evening fit into my schedule several times over the years. This year, I left the baking a little late in the day and then discovered partway into the coffee cake recipe that I had no eggs and no sour cream. I did have farm yogurt, which is pretty tangy, so I made that substitution without even blinking. And did you know that you can substitute both a quarter cup of yogurt and a mixture of baking soda and vinegar for an egg? Since I needed two, I used both, which worked perfectly. We didn’t get a thousand cakes, but we did exceed Amanda’s hopes for at least ten, and a smaller crowd than usual means Rudi and I got to take home our leftovers!

3. Yesterday and today’s Tour de France stages have been filled with beautiful fields of sunflowers. Some people might watch for mountains or cathedrals or even the bike racing, but I watch for flowers — sunflowers and lavender — and coastlines.

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

I was hoping Corey would stay asleep on the chair so I could demonstrate that I’d legitimately made progress on my shawl, but my counting woke him up. But this week’s book is the same size as last week’s books, so hopefully you can tell I’ve been working hard even without a 20-pound cat as a constant.

The knitting itself is not difficult, which, of course, means I’ve messed it up a bunch of times. Somehow alternating just two stitches on half the rows is harder than my brain can handle. Also, next time remind me not to wind my single ply yarn into a center-pull ball because holy hell, the knots and yarn barf I’ve had to put up with!

The advantage of actually knitting means I’m also doing a lot of reading. Sometimes it’s listening to an audiobook, which has the advantage of not needing to turn pages, but because of the aforementioned fuck-ups, I sometimes need to chant the stitches when I’m having difficulty paying attention, which then means I need to pause the book because I can’t pay attention to someone reading to me while talking aloud to my brain. Otherwise, I can read a print book, paying attention to the pattern on the right-side rows and reading a couple pages while knitting back on the wrong sides. It’s slow going, but not horrible.

On my phone, I have finished my cycling book, The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle, and downloaded the first of Peter Mayle’s Sam Levitt heist series, Vintage Caper, which is about to move from Los Angeles to France. It seems appropriate for Tour de France knitting, although I’m also pretty sure I figured out who perpetrated the crime in the scene in which that character was introduced, so it’s good that I’m looking for setting in this book, rather than solid crime writing.

In print, I’ve started Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal, a modern Los Angeles romance, in which the meet-cute happens because a writer’s boyfriend proposed to her at a Dodgers game (spelling her name wrong on the Jumbotron) and then, after she turns him down, a doctor and his sister help her escape from the media who want to interview her about it. You know, as it happens all the time. It’s light and frothy and innocuous, which is probably about right, given I can’t reliably wrap my head around two stitches.

I have Tommy Orange’s There There out from the library, so I should probably turn to that next, since there’s bound to be a long holds list for it. But if it doesn’t grab me right away, I might just return it again and resume reading my wintry books, Early Riser and Naughty on Ice, to combat our heat.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for the roundup.