Dad and I have been talking a lot about Harry Chapin recently. If you aren’t familiar with his songs (or just know “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which is the only song of his I remember hearing on the radio), you should check some out. He writes beautiful stories about people down on their luck and people who find love against the odds and people who live at the fringes (for better and for worse).

“Dance Band on the Titanic” is one of the songs of his that you can sing along with, even as we’re all thinking, “Please, God, S.O.S!”

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is top ten books that make me smile:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
3. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
4. Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy
5. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
6. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence
7. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman
8. Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
9. A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd
10. Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star

I’m a sucker for a happy ending and these ten all deliver in one way or another.

How about you? What books make you smile?

Most importantly, I slept in both mornings and also took a nap this afternoon after I got back from the farmers market.

The weekend included two evenings of digging in the garden — one to put in potatoes and the other to add beans. The herb section of the garden has gotten a little overrun in the last month, so I’ll need to do a certain amount of yanking in the next week to bring that back under control. But in digging up the potato bed, I did come across two small potatoes and pulled out four onions and the smaller of the two bronze fennels. And I harvested basil to top our capreses tonight.

We chatted with friends here in town, in the other Washington, in Georgia (the state), and London. It was nice to catch up.

We did grocery shopping and farmers market shopping. I have lettuce for salads and dish soap for salad plates.

I returned three items to the library and picked up one more, which I started to read tonight. It didn’t immediately hook me, so I’ll give it another try later in the week.

I ordered fancy Filipino doughnuts from a new bakery that I’ll pick up Friday afternoon as a reward for getting through this next week, which looks to be a challenging one at my couch office (there are two grants to write, 700 pages to test (not just by me) on a relaunched website, and a virtual gala to attend, in addition to my normal crushing amount of work).

Daiquiris and baked goods will have to wait until later in the week, perhaps as a reward for doing my taxes (where did I put those documents?) or perhaps just for continuing to get up each day. (I make my daiquiris without rum, so I could totally have one at 9 in the morning, right?)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go finish turning my sock heel and then turn in.

I only finished two books in April:

Stargazing, by Jen Wang

When they hear Moon’s mom is struggling to pay her bills, Christine’s parents offer to let the two of them live in their detached in-law apartment. Moon has a reputation of being violent, so Christine is reluctant to get to know her, but once she does, she finds the girl confident, funny, and fun to be around with a with a free spirit mom unlike her own strict Chinese-American parents. And Moon also has a secret — angelic alien beings visit her sometimes to tell her she’s not really from this planet. When the cause of these visits emerge, will Christine have the strength to be the friend Moon needs her to be?

I was having a really hard time concentrating for the first few weeks of being home. I had lots of books out from the library, and would read a chapter and then put it down. Then I’d read a few pages from another book. This sweet graphic novel, inspired by some real events in the author’s childhood, is the first thing that held my attention long enough for me to actually finish it. After reading this and The Prince and the Dressmaker, I feel confident recommending Jen Wang as a graphic novelist at the top of her game.

Pages: 224. Library copy.

Size 12 Is Not Fat, by Meg Cabot

Heather Wells a former teen pop star, who was dropped after she told her record label (which happened to have been owned by her fiancé’s father) that she wanted to record songs that she wrote. And then she walked in on her fiancé and another woman (also a pop singer). Oh, and her mom ran off with her manager and all her money. So, life could be better. But she’s got a job at an NYC dorm (or, residence hall, as the college insists it be called) as assistant manager, the opportunity to start taking classes if she can hold onto said job for six months, a BFF, a dog, songs that she works on in the quiet of her apartment, and a crush on her fiancé’s brother, who offered to let her live in an apartment in his house in exchange for doing the books for his P.I. business. So things are starting to normalize. That is, until a girl in her dorm plummets to her death while elevator surfing, the current stupid dorm trend. The police suspect an accident, but Heather’s not so sure. The girls in her dorm don’t, as a rule, elevator surf. So she starts asking some questions. But asking questions may not be the safest move for Heather.

I picked the fourth book in this series off the library shelf several years back and thought I’d see how it began. It’s definitely a light mystery and you will not be kept up at night by gristly descriptions. Light was what I needed back in the early days of the pandemic, when it was just starting to get nice enough to want to spend time outside, but the parks had closed. So I’d listen to it for half an hour as I walked round and round and round the traffic circle at the end of my street. It wasn’t a compelling enough story to make me want to keep going so I could find out what happened next, but was enough of a distraction to keep me moving, which was exactly enough. I’d probably read the rest of the series, but would likely switch back to paper to move through the story faster.

Pages: 345. Library audiobook copy via Overdrive.

Monthly Stats

Books: 2
Authors: American. One Asian-American.
Pages: 569

It’s been another grueling (mostly in a good way) week at work, which means I also need to work on putting in adequate time recreating this weekend, right?

Here’s some of what I’m hoping to squeeze into (or out of) the weekend:

• Taking a trip across the river to the library. Arlington has weekend afternoon pickup hours, and I have a book on hold that will expire on Sunday.
• Video-chatting with friends. We now have a monthly chat with globe-trotting friends who used to live in D.C. (and a couple who still do).
• Drinking daiquiris. The more we have this weekend, the less we have to clear out of our freezer when our new fridge arrives later this week.
• Baking. Now that I have a/c, the thought of turning on my oven and stove no longer fill me with dread.
• Gardening. The potatoes that need planting really need planting, so I’ve moved them out into the hallway. Now I just need to dig out some beans to add to the mix.
• Knitting. I’d like to get past the heel hump of my sock. Too many of my work projects feel like this — that I’m stuck on one piece that takes all my mental energy, preventing me from moving it along to the next stage. The only way through any of these things is through, which means butt in seat, head in game.
• Shopping. Interestingly, dish soap has not magically appeared in my kitchen, but dirty dishes keep doing so. (No one said magic was fair.) The weekend is really not the ideal time to have to go to the store, but it is what it is. But I probably have some Doctor Bronner’s in the camping cube I can use if I need to, but that requires more digging in the closet than I really want to do.
• Reading. I’ll probably spend some of the time at the garden listening to an audiobook, but I’d also like to put in some time turning literal pages.
• Spending time outside. There is absolutely no reason why I can’t do at least several of the items on my list from the park. (Shopping and baking could be a little bit of a challenge, but gardening definitely is a check in this column…)
• Sleeping in. Again, a lot harder to do when your apartment is warm, so I’m really looking forward to spending a little extra time in bed.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The trichomes on one of my garden’s tomato stalks catch the low angle of the evening’s sunbeams and shine as if fairies had strung them up to the light the way to the butterfly ball. (Trichomes are the hairlike structures on plants’ stalks and leaves. They serve a variety of purposes, and botanists theorize on tomatoes they discourage predators. And An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball was a picture book I grew up with by the renowned Jane Yolen that combined counting and beautiful illustrations by Jane Breskin Zalben.)

2. A woman stops by the park with two dogs. One is an adorable 10-week-old puppy and the other an adult Australian shepherd. She throws a Frisbee across the field, and the older dog tears past, leaping in the air to catch the disc and racing with it back up the field to lay it at her feet. The dog’s athleticism wows everyone in the park, as we all look up from our meals, books, and conversations to marvel at its aerial feats. The puppy is content to trot a few steps after its friend, stand for a second, and then trot back with it to their person.

3. We have a new air conditioner. Our previous one behaved temperamentally for two weeks last month — working for a couple hours and then beeping incessantly until you unplugged it — and then, just before the heatwave commenced two weeks ago, it refused to do anything at all. Which, oddly enough, is exactly what Rudi and I felt like doing as the temperature in our basement apartment inched up toward the upper 80s. But now we have a lovely new machine that makes us want to work and cook and sleep again, and Corey has cardboard and styrofoam upon which to nap.

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