Wishing you all a truly happy spring with the opportunity to be outside and together with those you love.

I absolutely plan to be asleep at 5:37 a.m. EDT, but will be celebrating the arrival of spring in my dreams.

Once I wake, here are some other ways I’m hoping to mark the weekend:

• Tracking down strawberry plants for my garden and doing another planting of peas
• Reading
• Finishing the stripey pair of socks I had lingering on the needles before Sock Madness began
• Eating cake (I baked a sour cream and blueberry jam cake after Rudi went to bed and then ate two slices!)
• Making some space in the living room (I signed up for a series of pilates videos for the next 30 days and need to shift things around enough to do them)
• Spending time out in the sunshine
• Watching women’s basketball
• Having homemade pizza (unless we decide to metro up to our favorite pizzeria)
• Painting my nails
• Finding photos of our friend Jerry for his Zoom memorial service

How will you be spending the first days of spring?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The times you most appreciate renting, rather than owning, property is when there is a dead, bloated ROUS outside your window and someone has to remove it so it stops stinking up your living space.

2. Sunday was March 14 (aka Pi Day in the U.S.; places who write their dates with the month second observe it on July 22). We were feeling down after our friend’s death, so we pushed our celebration off by 24 hours, and I capped a day off by baking broccoli-cheese quiche and apple crisp. They were both quite tasty.

3. The extra hour of daylight every evening is absolutely worth misplacing an hour of sleep until fall.

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

So … Sock Madness 2021 … We can now officially chalk it up as the year I wasn’t paying attention.

See how we have two flowers next to each other?

We should not. They should be set off from one another, by half, so that they alternate down the leg like garden stepping stones, rather than like the rectangles of a hopscotch board. I just absolutely read the pattern wrong, which is a little irksome because I thought to myself that if I’d been designing this pattern I would have alternated them … exactly the way the designer did … rather than spacing the flower rows out by a couple dozen twisted rib rows.

It’s fine. I had already missed a smock on the other side, which would have eliminated me from competition anyway. But now I am left with the decision of what to do with the sock. Obviously it would be silly to keep knitting it the way I thought the pattern had been written, since I already didn’t think it should be done that way. I could rip it back to the start of the first flower and knit it right. In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t gone far past it, but I do not love twisted stitches and would prefer not to redo a couple dozen rows. I could decide I’m doing a variation, with a row of flowers at the top, not dissimilar from a band of colorwork and then just alternate from the nearest spot it makes sense to begin down the leg, which could look a little wonky with flowers that close together vertically, but also might look fine. I could come up with some other sort of variation that stops the twisted stitches once I get to the foot. Or, I could rip back to the cuff, which is pretty and not so many twisted stitches I would resent having to replicate them on a second sock and knit some other pattern down the leg. Thoughts? Other ideas?

I started Ring the Hill tonight and have not gotten very far, because I’m having to stop myself from wanting to tweet out/highlight gems of quotes every couple paragraphs. I’m in a bit of a reading funk, so finding something where I like the language is helpful, but not really for finishing a book quickly. I’m also still listening to The Midnight Library, but it’s also not hooked me so much that I want to listen nonstop.

If you want to see what others are knitting and reading, head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

Last week, Japanese Breakfast, which is the stage name of Michelle Zauner, just kept popping up on my radar. Sometimes that happens for a reason. The Grammy Awards were coming up and maybe she was nominated for something. But she wasn’t. So then I knew it was just the universe trying to tell me to look into it. I try not to ignore the universe, because the universe doesn’t like being ignored and tends to have nasty ways of upping the ante. No, I don’t know what the escalation would have been for not following up on a band named after a meal, and I don’t think I want to. Do you?

Anyway, the universe was right and the video that was out for her (their?) single, “Be Sweet,” was campy ’80s fun. I thought I’d share it with you here, because clearly that’s what the universe wants to have happen. It’s like a chain letter, but cosmic.

Apparently, she performed this song on Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, but I think the video makes the song. But I’m sure she was also good live.

The seasonal Top Ten Tuesday lists at That Artsy Reader Girl tend to be among my favorites, partly because they just require I give you a list of the books I’m looking forward to reading the most over the next three months. Easy!

Here are ten I’m hoping to get to this spring:

1. Let’s start easy. These are my two most recent purchases: Reynard the Fox by Anna Louise Avery
2. Ring the Hill by Tom Cox
3. Adding to my British animal theme, Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit was a Christmas gift. Plus, I will always read everything he writes, even if I don’t always love it.
4. I haven’t yet picked up Murder on Cold Street, the latest in my favorite mystery series by Sherry Thomas, because they only had one copy at the bookstore at Christmas and it was a gift. The library across the river has a print copy, so I’ve requested they put it on hold for me.
5. An Unexpected Peril by Deanna Raybourn only came out at the beginning of this month. I’ve added it to my library holds list, as well.
6. The final book in Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters trilogy, Act Your Age, Evie Brown!, also just came out.
7. Gish Jen’s The Resisters, a baseball meets sci fi dystopia novel.
8. I heard about Serena Singh Flips the Script by Sonya Lalli during a local bookstore’s Galentine’s Day event, plus it’s set here in D.C.!
9. Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse was one of the Alex Award Winners, a category of adult fiction which tends to appeal to young adults.
10. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

What are you hoping to read this spring?