This weekend was the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, and, as I mentioned earlier, because Rudi needed to go to Pennsylvania on Saturday for a ski coaching meeting, we got a rental car for the weekend. Rudi had a party to go to, so I hit the festival on my own.

While yesterday was remarkably pleasant, rain moved in last night and stayed all day, which gave the grassy areas of the festival grounds the consistency of chocolate pudding. But I and some intrepid few turned up today to take in both sheep and wool.

Here are some of the sheep I ran into:

(more…)

I caught three of the embassies holding open houses today:

India:

2019 marks the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth and the Indian embassy had a nice exhibition focusing on his importance to their nation — and to the world. They also had performers, sari and turban wrapping, henna, and chai.

Kenya:

Each embassy does things a little differently. While India kept us all doing a tight loop of their first floor space, Kenya decided just to keep us out in the yard. They turned their backyard into a marketplace, had henna in front of the building, and had dancing and food, including mahambri, their delicious version of fried bread, in the courtyard.

and Haiti:

Haiti led us through their gorgeous back courtyard and across two floors of their mansion. They’ve decorated with gorgeously colorful artwork and have profiled the contributions of Haitian Americans throughout the first floor. They also featured djs and performers, wine samples, and native collage artists.b

Embassy weekends are always a lot of fun. EU Nations are open next weekend, and I hope to cross off a few more from my list then.

It doesn’t seem fair that I go along all winter desperately investigating and inventing things to do and then spring shows up and suddenly some weekend in April there’s a nimiety (I just found this word, but I’m totally inserting into conversations now…) of activities to squeeze between Friday and Sunday.

This weekend, those things include:

• Finish a cover letter.
• Pick up freebies at Free Comic Book Day (there are two comic book shops within a mile of our apartment).
• Visit embassies for their annual open house.
• Stop at my local library branch for their first used book sale.
• Head across town to a friend’s housewarming party. (Also, pick up a gift. I wonder if he’d like some free comic books… But it will probably be alcohol.)
• Plant the four seedlings I dropped off at the garden on Wednesday. Also, thin some of my seeds. (Seriously, it’s like the only ones that wanted to grow were the ones I dropped in groups.)
• Buy strawberries and pea shoots and asparagus at the farmers market.
• Send out some mail. (May is a very mail-y month.)
• Spend Sunday at admiring sheep and petting wool (and vice versa) at Sheep & Wool.
• Return the rental car. (Rudi has to go to Pennsylvania in the morning for a meeting and it didn’t cost much more to keep it another day so I could head up to Howard County on Sunday.)

How about you? What do you have on tap for the weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A resolution to the conflict between the Parks department and the local Friends group of my local park that my volleyball league found itself in the middle of has been reached, at least as it affects our games. We’re moving to another nearby park, which means I’ll be able to continue going to mine without fear of angry looks from all my neighbors. Now, if we could just find a solution to game-time thunderstorms…

2. I took my laptop to a local coffeehouse for a sunny afternoon sitting at their picnic tables bookmarking job openings, including one I’d particularly like to fill.

3. When I stopped by the garden yesterday to drop off some seedlings (dusk was approaching too rapidly to plant them), I noticed the Parks department was doing their first test-fill of the pool. The cover had come off in April, so I knew we had to be reaching this point, but it was nice to have confirmation. They’ll use this fill to make sure there are no problems with the pipes or cracks that need fixing and then will drain the pool completely to do whatever maintenance they deem necessary and clean it one final time before doing a last fill before the Memorial Day opening weekend.

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

I’ve returned to my Lightning Shawl for a final strip, although probably not soon enough to finish and block it in time to wear it to Sheep & Wool on Sunday. But either way, it should be done soon and that will be good enough.

On the reading front, on Sunday, I picked up Jeff Zentner’s latest, Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, about two high school senior friends from Tennessee who host a public access program where they show old monster movies and do campy interstitials, à la Elvira or Svengoolie. It is good so far, but I can see where trouble lies ahead for the characters, which stresses me out. On a less stressful note, I’m listening to Jenny Han’s P.S., I Still Love You, the second in her romantic trilogy about the fallout a girl experiences after letters she wrote, but never intended to send, to her previous crushes get mailed. The first book was made into a Netflix movie, which I thought stayed true enough to the book (although with way fewer baking sessions than I thought should have been included) and the second one has been greenlit, so this seemed like a good time to listen to it.

Check out what others are reading and crafting at As Kat Knits.

Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day, the annual biblio-holiday celebrating the small, community-based bookstores around the country. D.C. booksellers put together a crawl that included discounts, and if you visited 10 of them, you’d get a tote bag commemorating the event.

I did not make it to all ten, having not finished my job application early enough to leave me time to accomplish the task before our movie showtime. Getting around town by bikeshare just takes the amount of time it takes — you cannot make bikes magically appear at deserted docks and I am a slow cyclist — and I would have needed another hour to check off the two other neighborhoods I didn’t make it to.

However, I made it to five shops and came home with a modest, budget-friendly haul — three books, a magnet, a sticker, and some birthday cards (not shown).

First the books:

• The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a special signed copy available for Independent Bookstore Day. I read it a couple years ago and loved it, and owning a copy seemed like a nice idea so that I could reread it periodically at my pleasure.
• archy and mehitabel is a 1927 collection of poems from a column at The Evening Sun purportedly written by a cockroach (archy) about his early 20th-century adventures with a his alley-cat pal, mehitabel. I mean, of course that had to come home with me!
• And, finally, Paroles is a collection of poems that came out just after the end of World War II about the French youth experience of growing up under German occupation. Because I’ve been working on my French comprehension, it seemed like a good fit for me. It was translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the French and English poems sit opposite each other on the page, so I can make sure my understanding is accurate.

And, finally, the ephemera. The magnet reads, “Tea fixes everything,” which if not true, is at least the closest to true as one can get around here. And the sticker is a Langston Hughes quote: “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink and be in love. I like to work, read, learn and understand life.” Seems about right.