Today is Thursday and you all know what that means. Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. I stopped by the garden on Thursday to see if anything needed to be picked. The peppers are abundant, but the tomatillo has been stripped of most of its promising blossoms. The culprit? I suspect the many-legged green fellow I found on one of the branches. He looked guilty when I asked him about it and grabbed onto the branch even tighter.

2. I rode my bike along the C&O Canal Towpath Sunday afternoon. On the way back, I stopped just below the dam in a peaceful spot on the Potomac called Little Falls. Birds tend to congregate there to hunt fish and to get a drink, and a rock outcropping allows you to sit and look out over the river. The sun was low in the sky when I finally decided to head back out onto the trail to make my way home.

3. Rudi and I were holding hands last night as we left the ballpark when we came to a point where a pay phone blocked our path. Rudi went to one side and I to the other, and we reached up high, high, high over the phone so we didn’t have to let go.

This is not beautiful per se but I’d still appreciate if you’d help me with it. My friend Suzanne has returned home to Maine for the time being because her mom is having some serious health issues. Please visit her blog and let her know that she and her family are in our thoughts or prayers. Group thought is an amazing thing and some mighty powerful vibes are needed.

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. Our building served make your own sundaes today. We took our lunch break to coincide with them and ate outside. Brownies, whipped cream, two flavors of ice cream, and various other toppings filled my waffle cone bowl.

2. I took a bit too relaxed an exit of my parents’ home on Monday afternoon and we realized en route to the airport that we were not going to make it in time for me to catch my flight. I called the airline to reschedule my flight and we went to Marshalls instead. I came away with a cute new pair of shoes, a fetching tweed newspaper boy hat, and two darling baby doll cardigans. (If I’d planned to go, none of it would have been there. I’m sure of it. Best shopping trip I’ve had in ages…)

3. En route to work Tuesday morning, I pass three people wearing black and white vertically striped shirts. Was it a mass escape from prison? A fashion coincidence? A conference? Either way, I kept expecting someone to blow a whistle and call me for traveling.

A bonus beautiful thing: It would be impossible for me to pick just three beautiful things from my long weekend in Connecticut, so I’m selecting the weekend as a whole. It was three days filled with relaxation, sleeping late, watching videos and movies, buying yarn, and visiting with Gramma, Mum and Dad, and Karen. I ate pizza, peach pie, berry muffins, barbecued chicken, and a phenomenal turkey sandwich and drank a strawberry daiquiri and a raspberry-lime rickey. I came back to D.C. feeling rested and relaxed and ready to fire on all cylinders.

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. As Rudi and I were cycling home last week along the C&O Canal Towpath, trying to beat the dusk, I begged a breather. While we were stopped, a couple passed us, headed in the opposite direction. “Nice legs!” the girl shouted to Rudi. And she’s right.

2. As I take my first sip of tea in the morning or late at night, I can feel the warmth and relaxation spreading through me as the hot liquid pours down my throat. It’s one of the nicest sensations.

3. The dam on the Potomac was our turnaround point on Sunday’s bike ride. We had paused to watch a heron standing in the middle of the river when a bald eagle swooped down for a drink. He was impressive if a little far off. The next day, while we were paddling in the pool, two bald eagles soared over us. Who would have thought they’d just fly over the city that way? It really was amazing!

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. A tourist family walks past me one morning. The mother, hugging her pre-teen daughter to her hip, beams down at her proudly. The girl looks delighted. This strikes me as an Our Town moment, so I’m preserving it in history for the two of them here.

2. A trio of babies came into my world this week. One, Audrey, is six months old and belongs to Dini, a video journalist friend from the last political campaign. We hadn’t seen her since her son was a baby (maybe three years ago?) until we ran into them Sunday afternoon on our walk home from the farmers’ market. Two others were born this week: Derek to a college friend, Lunesse, and Jack to a colleague of mine, Angelique.

3. Not wanting to miss the early-morning lunar eclipse this week, Rudi and I set our alarms for 5:30 a.m. We rise silently and dress and head outdoors. Not surprisingly, we cannot see the area of the sky necessary from our corner, so we zig-zag down the road to a clearing. Low clouds have rolled in along the horizon, obscuring the pre-dawn sky. “It definitely looks darker than usual over there,” I say hopefully, pointing toward the west. Rudi agrees but also suggests we will probably not see much more than that darkness and that we should return home to bed. We stumble back to the Burrow and are asleep almost immediately.

I’m still feeling snuffly and a bit cotton-headed, so I’m going to give you three more beautiful things as I mull over other things I’m supposed to be working on and sip my tea:

1. As I walk into the coffee shop by the office, their radio starts to play a song and I immediately think of Grey Kitten. At first I think it’s a song from Aladdin, but then I realize it’s “Somewhere Out There,” which is from An American Tale. Now that we live 2,693 miles apart (give or take), we don’t get to see movies together very often, but when we were both teenagers we used to see them regularly — sometimes every week — so I have a number of songs that make me think of him.

2. I am alone for lunch today, so I go down to the corner park and sit at an outside table with my iPod and my knitting. A fluffy little sparrow, hoping for a handout, perches on the chair opposite mine and eyes my lunch greedily, and I contemplate for a moment asking him to dine with me. Instead, the woman at the table flirts with him by throwing him bread crumbs.

3. Because I’ve been knitting only socks and baby items recently, I’ve been used to plodding along on US2 or 3 needles. My current (secret) project is worked on US8s and I find that it is flying off the needles. In the heat, I don’t want a big project that will sit on my lap, but this week has been cooler so I don’t have to resort to tiny objects. When the temperatures soar towards 100 on Saturday, I won’t be working on the big project, but it’s nice to think it’s waiting here for me as September comes around the corner.

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. On our walk home from the farmers’ market this Sunday we passed a bulldog on a leash. He had to have been the happiest bulldog I’ve ever seen, with a jaunty step and and a smile on his face (really!). He buh-dum-buh-dum’ed past us on the sidewalk, delighted at a lovely morning walk.

2. I was showing Mum and Dad the garden plot on Saturday when the community pool opened next door. There was a dash by 30 or so people to the deck chairs lined up on the shallow side of the pool and it sort of felt like a bit of a feeding frenzy.

3. My pillow grows warm very quickly and I am feverish. I flip the pillow over and the second side is refreshingly cool against my head.