Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. An earlier growing season in Florida means I can bring fresh strawberries home as a souvenir.

2. We got a chance to see a preview of The Way Back, Ben Affleck’s latest picture, this week. In it, Affleck plays an alcoholic construction worker and former high school basketball star, whose priest asks him to coach their school team. It’s not perfect, but it was both heartfelt and remarkably well acted. Recommended.

3. The beach. Always the beach.

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

March 1 is the first day of meteorological spring (as opposed to astronomical spring, which is the vernal equinox later in the month), and if this weekend is any indication, D.C. is skipping the lion part of the season I grew up with in New England and skipping right ahead to the lamb:

Are there signs of spring where you live?

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books with single-word titles. I figured I’d run through my Goodreads list and give you the books I’ve liked best with only a single moniker:

1. Summerland by Michael Chabon: This was the first book I reviewed here on the blog oh so many years ago. It’s a middle-grade book that combines folklore and baseball and maybe needs to be reread in the near future.
2. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick: Selnick is a master at combining art and words in unusual ways to tell a story, making middle-grade books that are doorstoppers but also simultaneously page-turners. This particular story tells seemingly parallel stories about disability and adventure in New York City.
3. Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell: Part Peter Pan, part A Little Princess, part Mary Poppins, this middle-grade book focuses on a little girl found floating in a cello case in the wake of a shipwreck, the kindly man who raises her, the system that wants her to conform to societal norms, and the Parisian waifs who help her pursue her dreams.
4. Landline by Rainbow Rowell: This is the Gen X book for longtime sweethearts, but maybe particularly for those of us who feel like we’ve been the steady, introverted, unexciting half of a couple for a long time. This is one of Rainbow’s two adult novels and sort of falls into what I (but maybe not strictly abiding by the literary definition of) magical realism.
5. Uprooted by Naomi Novik: This coming-of-age fairy tale (shelved sometimes as YA and sometimes for adults) talks about female friendship and reimagines what it is that we should really fear in the dark wood.
6. Booked by Kwame Alexander: In this middle-grade verse tour-de-force, Alexander gives us a boy who comes to love soccer and words equally.
7. Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: In this finale of The Illuminae Files space opera trilogy, all of our teen heroes (and our favorite formerly murderous AI spaceship) return to the place where the story began — a planet with an illegal mining operation where a gigantic militarized corporation has terrorized the population.
8. Savvy by Ingrid Law: In this middle-grade folklore story, everyone in this family develops a magical superpower (like the ability to open locks or direct rain) on or leading up to their 13th birthday. When on the eve of her birthday, a girl’s father is suddenly hospitalized, she must figure out how to channel what she assumes is her “savvy” to save him while keeping it a secret from those who might not understand what makes her so different.
9. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt: The first in The Tillerman Cycle, this decades-old middle-grade novel features a teen girl who must somehow ferry her three younger siblings from Connecticut, where their mother has abandoned them, to the South (I am surprised to discover that’s southern Maryland, about an hour from here, rather than Georgia), where the grandmother they’ve never met lives.
10. Ghost by Jason Reynolds: In the first of his four middle-grade Track novels, Reynolds introduces us to a troubled boy who excels at sprinting who happens onto a track team one afternoon. But he is being held back from success by his past and until he deals with those ghosts (with the help of his three new teammates and his ex-Olympian coach), he won’t be able to move forward.

How about you? What are the Madonna’s, Prince’s, and Beyoncé’s of your favorite reads?

This weekend was a good one. It started on Friday night in Fort Lauderdale, where I caught an outdoor family-friendly concert and craft fair. I sang along with plenty of pop songs, ate a crepe, and generally enjoyed being outside on a February evening.

Most of my Leap Day was spent at the beach, although I did precede it with a bike ride over to a local farmers market. I picked up baked goods, a baguette, burrata filled with nutella, oranges, strawberries, and tropical fruit, much of which became my breakfast and lunch. I read on the sand, dipped myself in the water, and enjoyed people watching. (There’s a lot of Instagramming that goes on at the beach, particularly on the first official day of spring break season.) The sun was setting as I arrived at the airport, which seemed a pretty fitting end to my trip.

To kick off March today I did sleep in a bit today before getting up and heading off to the farmers market. My team had our final bowling match of the season and then we each headed out our own ways. My friend Sigrid and I strolled back toward Dupont together, possibly our last such walk, since she and her husband pack up to move back to Germany at the end of the month. I did a little grocery shopping, got in some phone time with my folks and my friend Laura, made a lasagna, and did a very little bit of tidying up before Rudi came home. After he went to bed, I started a new graphic novel, New Kid, which won the Newbery Medal this year. I’m nearly halfway done and am really enjoying it so far.

Tomorrow it’s back to the office. I thought there might be another trip coming up later this month, but it looks like some other colleagues are going to cover that, so I feel optimistic that I might be able to catch up on several projects. It would feel great to not be so behind on things and to start my second six months at my job with some things crossed off my to-do list!

I hope your week is a good one (it’s that magical last week before daylight savings time robs us of an hour of sleep) and that you get to cross some things off of your to-do list, as well!

I’m home. Corey was delighted to see me arrive and now is eager to remind me where we keep the bedroom.

But first, I wanted to think about what I’d like to do tomorrow:

• Sleep in a bit. I didn’t get to do that today (although I also didn’t get up to watch the sun rise over the ocean the way I’d considered) and am looking forward to it. I’d guess Corey will also agree that’s a good way to spend the morning.
• Stop at the farmers market to buy milk and drop off compost.
• Go bowling. Our team is vying for third in the league playoff during the final week of the season.
• Unpack. Rudi will also have bags tomorrow night, so I’d like to minimize their impact on the living room.
• Call a friend I keep missing in phone tag.
• Do some laundry.
• Start my Sock Madness sock. The first pattern arrived today and I’ll have until midday on the 14th to finish a pair to advance to the next round or a single sock to get all the patterns. I haven’t gotten out of round one in several years…
• Get Rudi to put aloe on my upper back. It’s the most ridiculous sunburn, full of bumpy edges at the limits of where I could reach myself. I had hoped that I had compensated for that knowledge by putting on a long-sleeve shirt in time, but alas.

How about you? How’s your weekend going? Are you ready for a fresh new month’s start?