This is the final weekend of January. Here’s how I’m thinking I’ll spend it:

• Spend time with Rudi. I think this the last weekend he’s around for a while with the ski race season peaking in February and all-weekend coaching duties calling, so that tops on my list. However, he’ll be gone during the day both days, so I also hope to…
• Hang up fairy lights around the perimeter of the room. We didn’t get them up before our December party, and then there was a tree preventing us from getting them all the way around the room. Since it’s now sitting on the curb awaiting composting and since we have many more months of darkness ahead (although way less each day than a month ago), I think this is an appropriate way to welcome February.
• Wash laundry. Now that I no longer have a tree taking up so much of my living room, we can once again use our larger laundry rack in its usual spot, rather than having to do the drying on the small rack in the bathtub (which we are grateful was an option).
• Buy bread. The bakery we like so much at the summer downtown farmers market will be doing a pop-up tomorrow just a mile away. I just need to get there before 12:30.
• Go to Georgetown. To the library in particular, since I have a hold that came in there that I forgot about that expires on Sunday.
• Eat pizza. There’s no real reason for this except pizza.
• Cuddle Corey. Both he and I need more snuggles right now.
• Play my ukulele. (That was the only thing from last weekend’s to-do list I didn’t get to.)
• Finish a book. I have several of the Cybils finalists out right now and would love to be able to have finished a whole category before the winners are announced on Valentine’s Day. I’d also like to get partway caught up with Middlemarch, which the library in the next town over is doing a group read of.
• Write a couple of longer blog posts, including the one where I figure out the best books I read last year.
• Enjoy the outside. There’s a rain storm and a cold day or two due mid-week, so I’d rather take advantage of nicer weather to be outdoors.

How about you? What are you hoping to do this weekend?

Today has been an absolutely craptastic day. I briefly considered that nothing seemed beautiful, but I know that’s not true from the perspective of one less dented in spirit than I, so I capitulated to tradition, against my lesser angels.

Here are three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Our friend Heidi had not an inkling when she returned home from dinner with friends that her her house was crammed with guests who wanted to wish her a happy 50th birthday.

2. I surrender the joy of bashing graham crackers to smithereens to Rudi as we make chocolate-butterscotch bars for tea.

3. On New Year’s Eve, one of the films we watched was On the Basis of Sex, the biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s formative law school and early career years. I was so captured by it (and by its local subject) that I borrowed the documentary RBG from the library. I’m delighted to report that it is also delightful and you will find the justice to be even more captivating after watching it than you thought before. (And it’s nominated for an Oscar in the documentary category, in case you care about that sort of thing.)

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

A new book and new knitting this week.

Here we have the start of a sock. It’s just a basic ribbed top, stockinette sock, but I find I have the most likelihood of finishing boring socks than fancy ones. The yarn is Regia Snowflake that Mum and Dad gave me for Christmas a couple years back.

The book is the Brittany Cavallaro’s second Charlotte Holmes/Jamie Watson novel, The Last of August, which, despite the name, takes place in late December. It’s fine thus far, but a little slow to get started, so I’m hoping it picks up its pace soon. I think I recall this being an issue with the first one, as well, which is probably why it took me this long to revisit the series. I’m listening to The Woman Who Smashed Codes and enjoying quite a bit this biography of the nation’s forgotten foremother of codebreaking.

Head over to As Kat Knits for more reading/crafting combo posts!

Rudi and I are on different sleep/wake cycles with him doing both on the earlier side (note, not early by normal standards, just earlier) and me on the later.

Our cats have long sorted themselves out at night accordingly, often by following the person they liked best. (In the morning, Corey will sometimes get up with Rudi, but everyone returns to sleep after he leaves for work.) Della went to bed with Rudi. Posey floated between us, but took over that role once she was gone. When it was just the three of them, Jeremiah stayed out with me. When we once again became a family of three cats after Della died, he would go in with Rudi to make sure he got settled, but would come back out to me. Once Posey was gone, Jer took her place, so Rudi wouldn’t have to sleep alone. Corey will go in with Rudi and Jer if I’m not home, but normally remains out with me until I’m ready to go to bed.

But that doesn’t mean he wants to just hang out in the same room. No, at night, he wants to be doing the same thing I am doing. So if I am typing a blog post, Corey wants to be draped across my left wrist and part of the keyboard. And as you can see here, he also wants to help me read my book. He tried both sides in case I had a preference, but since my preference was for him to remain on the far side of my book, eventually he gave up and took a nap on Rudi’s chair until I picked up the laptop and it was time for us to write to you. (He says hi.)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to look back at the books we meant to read last year but didn’t get to (and that, presumably, we intend to read in 2019). I am really bad at lists like this, not because I can’t make them, but because there are so many books I want to read (3,035 according to my Goodreads list as of this moment).

My track record is mixed. The list I made in 2018 includes only three titles I finished, but the one I set for myself in 2017 had seven completions. And I’ve read only four off 2016‘s list. So that’s 29 titles and less than half of them completed.

But what’s life without goals, right?

Here are ten titles I meant to read last year that I really think I’ve got a shot at:

1. Sarah McCoy’s Anne prequel, Marilla of Green Gables
2. Mackenzi Lee’s sequel, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
3. Markus Zuzak’s Bridge of Clay (Rudi gave this to me for Christmas, so it’s high on this year’s TBR pile)
4. Bruja Born by Zoraida Córdova
5. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
6. Tiffany Jackson’s Monday’s Not Coming (I own a copy of it, so it, too, is a get-to sooner book)
7. Aisha Saeed’s Amal Unbound
8. Circe by Madeline Miller (Karen gave me a copy for Christmas and it is conveniently sitting right next to me)
9. Rebound by Kwame Alexander
10. What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson

How about you? Were there books you meant to read in 2018 you didn’t get to?

With the temperature rapidly nosediving, I decided to head to the garden and harvest any greens still alive. It would have been better if I’d done this on Friday, before things got so cold, because my poor plants were crunchy with the chill. There were small amounts of lettuce and arugula from a late season planting and my sorrel was still flourishing, so I ended up filling the bag I’d brought.

At home, I have a cheerful bouquet of yellow tulips in a blue glass pitcher we salvaged from someone’s discard box a few years ago. I thought it looked particularly nice with the red of our Dutch oven and the winter scene from our Conn College calendar.