I admit that this week has been a bit of a low one in the Burrow. Nothing particularly horrible, which is good, but just confirmation of suckiness to continue — my office will work at home through the rest of the year, the pools won’t open this summer, D.C.’s cases remain high enough that you shouldn’t do things like eat at restaurants or be in places where there are people, which seems to stop no one but me from doing those things. I’m starting to look at the fall and the things that come after the fall with more than a little concern about our ability to do them, which stresses me out.

Which just means I should stop looking that far out and concentrate on the next couple of days:

I’m looking forward to trying the bread and butter pickles we made this week for the first time. I have several more cucumbers in the fridge, so may give dill pickles a shot next.

I’m looking forward to finishing my socks. I got a few more rows knit while in those meetings yesterday, so it’s completely doable if I just put my fingers to it.

I’m looking forward to video chatting with my folks and my brother on Sunday.

I’m looking forward to reading, maybe outside.

I’m looking forward to eating pizza.

I’m looking forward to finally buying a couple more face masks, because I always seem to keep running out.

I’m looking forward to Christmassy yarn arriving in the mail because I splurged a couple weeks ago.

I’m looking forward to baking some bread and making some ice cream.

I’m looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow because Rudi’s going on a bike ride and won’t be around to guilt me up before I’m done being in bed.

I’m looking forward to watching Endeavour Sunday night if we can get PBS to come back in.

What are you looking forward to this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We had our monthly video chat with friends. Everyone had relatively upbeat updates to share, from remote preschool to exercise habits to interviews.

2. Isiais did not bring the fury here that he did in some other places. Indeed, in his wake, cooler temperatures have stuck around, which have been welcome after the 28 days of 90+-degree days in July.

3. The midweek farmers market included a man who heads back to his father’s village in Greece each February to harvest olives and bottle micro-batches of olive oil. It was a pricey splurge, but I’m looking forward to sampling it on Sunday’s capreses.

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

The dusk really shows the pooling on my second sock! I was going to say I didn’t think it was that obvious in normal light, but I just went back and looked at previous week’s photos, and it is. That’s fine. I’m getting closer to being done. If tomorrow and Friday’s multi-hour Zoom calls allow for knitting, I could be done by the weekend! (I will definitely be done by the weekend after the next few days of calls. It is possible my sock may not be.)

Oona Out of Order is overdue to the neighboring library system, so I decided to focus on it more heavily. I’m also nearing the end of The Library Book — something ridiculous like 15 months have passed since I started it. On my phone, I’m not crazy about the reader (accents) for my current audiobook, The Gilded Wolves, so I’m thinking I’ll ditch it for a print copy. I already have another one checked out and ready to go — Sonya Lalli’s The Matchmaker.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what else is going on with the Unraveled crew.

Happy National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day! Would you care for one? They’re still warm!

My (ahem) 3000+ tbr list on Goodreads includes, as you might imagine, more than a few books with colors in the title. Here are ten of them I’d like to read sooner rather than later, per this week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl:

1. White Oleander by Janet Fitch (I’ve owned this for two decades…)
2. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Ditto to this one. Hardcover from the year it came out.)
3. Overground Railroad: The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy A. Taylor (I’ve read two novels in the past couple years where The Green Book has played a role, and I feel like I’d like to know more.)
4. Black and White by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge (Superheroes and superfrenemies)
5. Black Widow: Forever Red by Margaret Stohl (My favorite Avenger!)
6. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson (Everything she writes is great.)
7. Bluecrowne by Kate Milford (A prequel to the events of the Greenglass House series.)
8. Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy (raidergirl, do I want to read this one?)
9. The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke (Time travel back to the 1980s — I am old.)
10. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (Potentially dangerous magical orphans and a middle-aged introvert set in his ways.)

Have you read any of these books?

Most people would be surprised by how many colors of nail polish I own. Rudi would be surprised that neither do the bottles multiply when we close the bathroom cabinet door nor do they lie in wait for when he next opens it.

Shekerbura from Sharbat, the Azerbaijani bakery that opened the next neighborhood over from ours last month. We also sampled two types of savory pastries and two types of cake.

I mean, it’s as good a reason as any. Also, we were impressed with the percentage of people we saw wearing masks while we were out.

I won’t get out to the sunflower fields in Maryland this year, so this was a nice yard to come upon.

Be a beautiful cupcake.

How was your weekend?