A couple years ago, Rudi and I found ourselves at the beach on a very breezy day. I didn’t think much of it and enjoyed the day for what it was, reading my library book as usual. Until we got to the end of the day and it was time to pack up, when I went to close my library book and found I couldn’t. So much sand had blown in between the pages as I’d read it that it no longer lay flat. I literally ended up pouring sand out of the plastic cover and shaking out each page before it even remotely resembled something I could return to the library in good faith.

So this week, when faced with a breezy forecast, I brought two books to the beach. One, An Unexpected Peril, was my current read, a new book of which I am the first reader of the library copy. There was a breeze, albeit a gentle one, so I opted to keep it in my bag. Instead, I started Silva Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, which I procured from a Little Free Library sometime in the last year. Set in Mexico in the 1920s, it focuses on a teen girl who accidentally frees a Mayan god from a locked trunk in her grandfather’s room and who then must help him on a quest in order to save her own life. So far, so good.

On the knitting front, I’m down to a handful of rows on my Smock Madness socks, so I decided to pull out Wohin?, the pair of socks I didn’t finish from Sock Madness 2020. I only made it halfway through the heel flap before the world started to shut down and with it my desire to knit. I’ve done nothing more than find the UFO, so I have no info on whether this is the right project to tackle next or not, but I figured I’d at least take a look.

Head to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup of reading and crafting.

Say hello to my Winter 2021 Stripey Socks:

They were knit in Havirland Pax Socks in the Holiday Hangover colorway on US 1.5 dpns.

I started them in mid-January, finished knitting them in early March, and finally got around to weaving in the ends on Palm Sunday.

They are perfect for wearing to (but not really on) the beach on a bright spring day, and I love how happy they make me.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday list from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share books that frustrated us in one way or another. I rarely carry on reading books I hate, so there are plenty of books I’ve let go over the years, but this particular prompt suggests antipathy to me, which means I have to truly resent a book in one way or another, and that means I actually thought it worth carrying on until the end for one reason or another. Here are the nine one-star reads I have recorded on Goodreads, which amounts to “I finished it, but wish I hadn’t”:

1. Fat Vampire, by Adam Rex
2. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
3. A Walk to Remember, by Nicholas Sparks
4. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
5. The Pearl, by John Steinbeck
6. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
7. Summer People, by Marge Piercy
8. Needled to Death, by Maggie Sefton
9. Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark & Carol Higgins Clark

How about you? Do you have any books you want to chuck in the ocean?

In the last week, the garden went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

Partly it’s because I spent a good portion of this afternoon digging up sections of my bunching onions and shifting them to the fenceline so I could put in the flat of new plants Rudi and I bought yesterday. (I added a couple new herbs, celery, yellow onions, strawberries, and flowers.)

And partly it’s because things are finally really starting to grow.

We have violets:

We have peas:

And we have spring greens:

I love this time of the year at the garden. You can really see the difference at every visit!

Today was a perfect spring day and exactly what I needed after the workweek I endured. Warm in the sun, brisk in the shade. Clear skies. Perfect for working at the garden. A small person who was at the park with his mom helped me spread wood chips on pathways by filling my wheelbarrow a handful at a time (I supplemented by the shovelful) and counting down when I should dump the load.

I stopped for bagels on the way home. They’d just come out of the oven and were still warm when Rudi cut into them.

After a siesta, Rudi and I took a late afternoon jaunt over to one of the nurseries I like. There is a flat of seedlings (including four more strawberry plants) waiting at the garden for me to plant tomorrow; apparently garden supplies are where I’ve decided my budget doesn’t apply. I blame all that fresh air and the oxygen released by all the plants at garden centers. Clearly it’s dangerously intoxicating to my working-inside-on-the-couch-all-pandemic brain.

We had a video chat with friends in Seattle and New Orleans before settling down for the night with big bowls of kale salad for supper.

Rudi’s heading off on a day trip to the mountains for a bike ride tomorrow and I’m going to make myself an Easter brunch after heading to the farmers market. (While I’m hoping to find freshly harvested ramps and greenhouse tomatoes there, neither will feature in my breakfast plans, which instead will fall heavily on the sweet side.) I’m going to putter down at the garden in the early afternoon and then recuperate at the park with a book, knitting, and a drink.

Happy Easter and final day of Passover to those who celebrate and happy Sunday to those who don’t. I’m wishing all of us a relaxing day of leisure.

Past me, the one who kept running up against her vacation limit (at my organization, when you bump up against your maximum vacation allowance, they stop letting you accumulate time off, so I ended up having to take off an emergency half day at one point because I wasn’t going to get the full vacation time I’d earned that pay period), booked a day off each in March and April. I’ve noticed in past years that President’s Day to Memorial Day is the longest drought of federal holidays in any year. Managing a too-heavy workload (and the attendant stress) is currently the biggest challenge of my job, and I suspected that not taking the occasional day off might figuratively kill me.

I have something I’m hoping to do on Monday, but I’m keeping it to myself right now for fear of jinxing it. (Family health emergencies and car woes have scuppered several days off over the past six months; I do not put it past the universe to laugh at me again.)

I do plan to spend some of Easter weekend outside at the garden (we have a public space workday tomorrow morning) and some of it baking. There’s a monthly video chat with friends who now live far away and possibly a get-together with a couple friends who still live nearby. I won’t have to watch the UConn women in the NCAA finals and the two baseball teams I follow had their games canceled due to a COVID outbreak amongst D.C.’s players, so that frees up some time for watching a video, starting a new (or picking up an old) knitting project, and wrapping up a couple books.

And if nothing else, I’ll be able to turn off my alarms for Monday morning and sleep in. Even if that’s all that happens, there are definitely worse ways to spend the third day of a long weekend.

How are your Easter weekend plans coming along?