The last days of June are slated to bring more of the hot, hazy, humid weather that’s been pressing down on D.C. this week. Today, after a morning excursion, I pretty much hid in our bedroom in front of the fan with all the rest of the lights in the apartment off. Obviously, that should not be my M.O. for the weekend, so here’s my plan:

• Work at the garden. Saturday is one of our periodic garden work days where we all put in time on the communal spaces of the garden. Plus, I’d like to get some beans planted in my plot, now that Rudi and I have found the ground again.
• Go swimming.
• Read a book. I’d like to get With the Fire on High back to the library. Acevedo is a D.C. resident and there’s a long hold list on this already overdue book.
• Check out the Folklife Festival. This year’s government shutdown put the kibosh on their usual international festival, so they opted to examine the social power of music, with a specific focus on the music of D.C.
• Track down raspberries at the farmers market. Yes, I’m still on the hunt.
• Deal with the fruit in my fridge.
• Find the title to the car. It’s here someplace. Just not in any of the places I’ve looked so far. Probably this requires a more concerted cleaning effort. Also, I maybe wasn’t looking far enough back, since I was thinking we’d brought it down in 2012, but apparently it was 2009 or early 2010.
• Repaint my nails. (Obviously after the garden work…)
• Eat pizza. It seems like a good weekend to do that, but we might punt it to next week.
• Replenish my tea canisters. And make iced tea, since I’ll have the box with all my teas in it open.
• Do laundry. I really wish I’d remembered we’d need quarters while I was out today. Now I need to hit the atm and the bank (but not the atm at the bank, where it charges money) before heading to the garden in the morning…
• Watch a film, probably at home. We have The Kid Who Would Be King out from the library, I have a free rental from Red Box that I have to use by Monday, and I see Kanopy has acquired Colette. Plus Netflix keeps adding new movies practically every week.

How about you? What’s on your weekend agenda?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. D.C. is in the midst of a heat wave, which makes doing anything feel gross. I went to the pool yesterday evening for the last couple hours it was open for the day and it was easily ten degrees cooler there than elsewhere in the neighborhood. (It’s adjacent to a park and woods that run down to a creek.)

2. As my friend and I were walking past my building to the bar this evening after our volleyball game, we happened upon my upstairs neighbor, who was out trying to share some of her homemade cookies.

3. I made pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes last year and I finally defrosted some of it to have for supper last night alongside our daiquiris, made with strawberries I’d also frozen last summer.

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

I ripped back my Lightning Shawl to try to fix that bad color shift when I switched yarns. This might be better — or it might be equally as bad. I think I’ll have to knit another couple inches away from it in order to really tell. I’m just so ready to be done with this project. Probably I should have just stopped after the end of the last strip, but I really wanted the shawl to be a little deeper than it was…

Below is the pre-ripping. Essentially, I pulled it back to before that solid golden splotch in the middle and am trying to make the gradient before and the gradient after play nicely. I have some long ends, so I’m wondering if I use it to sort of duplicate stitch over some of the other pre-merge point to help create a better semblance of matching.

Reading-wise, I started Elizabeth Acevedo’s new novel, With the Fire on High, tonight. So far, I’m really enjoying it. (Bridget, it’s set in Philly!) It’s about a senior in high school who lives with her abuela and her two-year-old daughter, Emma, and who loves to experiment in the kitchen.

The audio copy of Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You came back off the holds list for me, so that’s what I’m listening to on my phone. I need to start listening to Daisy Jones and the Six this weekend, though, in order to give the cds back to the library.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits for the round-up.

Last weekend, I encountered three new-to-me flowers:

Amidst the showy tiger lilies at the park, are these less flashy yellow lilies:

I am not sure this rogue daisy paver in its bed of pea gravel is any safer for our neighbors than the inset drain cover it’s sitting atop, but it’s pretty:

Finally, I caught a few of the By the People installations at the Smithsonian’s Art & Industries building on Saturday night, and this stairwell piece — Engage Urban Greening by Stevie Famulari — was my favorite. As the artist wrote, this seemed a simple solution for areas suffering from urban blight, since each paper flower is embedded with seeds that will grow into living flowers:

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is one of my favorites: our quarterly reading plan.

So what are ten of the books I’m most looking forward to reading this summer? For the sake of tidiness, I’m only including books I haven’t yet started:

1. Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High (It’s overdue, but I will get to it this week…)
2. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (I have it out on cd, because that’s considered old-school media and had no waitlist)
3. Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (First Son and Crown Prince in a romance!)
4. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking back the English Language by Amanda Montell (I mean, duh…)
5. Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal (baseball and romance!)
6. Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri (A graphic novel about my favorite on-screen scientist? And done by a skillful SFF writer? Yes, please!)
7. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer (This is really the only way I want to experience Joe Biden in contemporary pop culture.)
8. The Bermudez Triangle by Marueen Johnson (Summertime teen romances, picked up yesterday from my local Little Free Library)
9. Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits with Gun (I picked up and then put down the first of the Kopp Sisters novels back the same year it was published, but always meant to circle back to it. It was also in the Little Free Library yesterday, so now the circle requires fewer steps.)
10. Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli (About the summer twins turn 11 from the author of Stargirl and Maniac Magee)

How about you? What’s on your summer TBR list?

This weekend of long daylight and blue skies and low humidity included:

Shakespeare in the Yard (and a Burmese dinner al fresco). The wireless mics kept shorting out, but the show was well staged and the actors did an admirable job with one of my least favorite of the Bard’s plays (The Taming of the Shrew):

A new-to-me Smithsonian — the Freer Gallery of Asian Art — seen at night as part of Solstice Saturday. One of the highlights of the gallery is Whistler’s Peacock Room:

Rudi stayed with friends in Baltimore last night after a party and returned home early this morning bearing a smoothie bowl from the farmers market. We took another lap of the market later in the morning and returned to the Burrow for a brunch of homemade blueberry pancakes.

We spent the afternoon at the garden, where weeds and bolted greens and overly enthusiastic violet leaves had taken over my plot.

It started out looking like this:

After more than two hours, we found the ground in most of the plot:

We came home with two small tomatoes, some of our last peas of the season, enough greens for supper, oregano to put up, and sorrel to turn into soup.

How was your weekend?