Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We hadn’t done anything with the tomatoes I bought last week, so tonight is spent making tomato soup and Vicki’s roasted tomato sauce, which all the knitters swear by. Our apartment is ridiculously warm now, but, man, it smells so good!

2. While the park showing Wonder Woman seems to be carpeted with Astro Turf (or some derivative), it is significantly cooler than the areas around it and thus a significant improvement on the paved park where the films used to be held in that neighborhood.

3. Rudi has Monday off and I have a Groupon for the restaurant in the museum next to my office. We have a lovely lunch date in the air conditioning.

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

Apologies to those who don’t find the above image beautiful.

Three (other) beautiful things from my past week:

1. Corey was screaming at us as we opened the outside door after being away overnight at the beach.

2. My summer volleyball team has been hit or miss in their attendance and this week was definitely a miss. But several players from the game before ours stayed to help us out so that my teammate and I could get some playing in.

3. The weather the past two days has been absolutely beautiful. We’ve turned off the a/c and opened the window for the first time in a month.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. One of the farmers at the market had lisianthus, which has to be one of my favorite cut flowers, so several stems came home with me.

2. The small, subterranean movie theater near me has cordoned off an outdoor seating area for pre- and post-show relaxation. With its wide overhang, it was the perfect place to sip an Italian soda while finishing my library book after it started raining when I was at the pool.

3. Thousands of people from every walk of life (young, old, Black, white, Latinx, Asian, Jewish, Christian, straight, queer, cis, transgender, dog lovers, guy with a parrot) in my city came together last weekend to say that we believed love could vanquish hate and that fear would not make us shut up and stay home.

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

It’s Thursday, so that means it’s time to reflect back on three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I pass by a bulldog puppy on a leash who is occupying itself while its owner chats with friends. The puppy is sprawled in a tree box full of mulch and has found a bigger piece of wood to carry around.

2. We haven’t been to Wolf Trap, the outdoor performance amphitheater, in years, but decide to head out at the last minute to see Angélique Kidjo and Femi Kuti perform. We run into Michael, Julia, and Shawn (and Shawn’s boyfriend) when looking for a spot to park our blanket, so get to watch an amazing, high-energy concert with friends. (If you get the chance to see either artist perform, I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. You won’t regret it!)

3. We take a holiday for a day baseball game (on which it does not pour midday, although there are occasionally clouds that provide respite from the ongoing heatwave and humidity). I win the designated driver contest for the first time in more than ten years of entering, and the Nationals win the ballgame. Oh, and we happen upon a half-off clearance sale of All-Star Game merchandise, so come home with commemorative caps, too.

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

If it’s Thursday, it’s time to reflect back on three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Late Monday evening’s downpour was followed by a brief clearing, just long enough to cause an enormous rainbow to fill the eastern sky. I have never seen a rainbow that big — so large, in fact, that I had to use the panorama setting on my phone to capture both ends of it (and that was without the outer double rainbow). It was so impressive, I made Rudi pull the car over so we could capture it.

2. Tuesday night, we had tickets to the Mets-Nationals baseball game. Unfortunately, the Mets played a losing game of football, giving up 7 runs in the first inning and then several innings of three runs apiece. By the time the eighth inning came around, they were six pitchers and nearly 20 runs in the hole. What do you do in that situation? Why turn to your 35-year-old bench-warming, veteran shortstop, of course! That’s right, the Mets put José Reyes on the mound as their final pitcher of the night, where he flung nearly 50 pitches over the plate at speeds ranging from 57 mph (which tapped Ryan Zimmerman on the leg, who grinningly responded by pretending to charge the mound) to a respectable 87 mph. Sure, he gave up six more runs to make the evening the worst loss in Mets history (and ended his pitching debut with an ERA of 54.0 (still vastly better than the ERA of 135.0 he held for a little while)), but he made it a night no one who stuck around to the end of the game will ever forget.

3. San Francisco’s fog is world-renowned (also, it’s named Karl), so I wasn’t shocked to see the Golden Gate Bridge socked in on Friday. It was a little more surprising to watch disembodied wisps of it float through the trees in a park where I was walking the next afternoon, but it was also kind of cool.

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

It’s late and I’ve been traveling all day and … I just woke up from dozing off in the middle of that sentence a couple hours ago.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I was home when we flooded. Rudi was away for the weekend and things would have been bad if I had gone with him.

2. I bought some hummus & pita chips at the D.C. airport before leaving, which I did not need for my first flight today, but that came in handy for my second.

3. Clouds are just really cool when you’re looking down on them.

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