Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi and I have seen these guys playing in the park by the garden once before. They seem to have a weekly pool noodle football game. As best as we can tell, it’s a variation on flag football, but with less touching, presumably for sake of COVID-19. Either way, it amuses me greatly to see these guys running around waving their pool noodles in the air.

2. At my request, Rudi picked up Halloween-hued fairy lights from Target. We’ve only strung one of the three strands so far, but the orange, green, and purple lights make the early darkness more bearable.

3. Sarah and I refused to let the pandemic keep us from our annual fall tradition of picking apples and buying cider doughnuts.

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

Three beautiful things from our past week:

1. We spent the afternoon on Assateague Island, home to one of the wild pony herds in the U.S. We went camping at Assateague/Chincoteague about five years ago and I hadn’t seen any ponies, although Rudi had encountered them while out on his bike. So I was delighted that several of the ponies were out next the roadside as soon as we came down on their side of the bridge.

2. The day was overcast and a little cool and drizzly, with the water warmer than the air. The yellow flags were out indicating dangerous riptides, so I just stuck to wading. But the beach is the beach is the beach.

3. Somewhere along the line, Rudi and I have managed to spend 25 years together. He makes me tea every morning, sometimes even in the pot that he hates. He comes and kills/removes bugs when I ask him to (or screech), even if he’d been asleep at the time of the encounter. He gamely listens to hours of video when I get tired of having ear buds in and can probably give you word-for-word recitations of some of my patient testimonials at this point. He’s been party to the best and witness to the worst of my life for two and a half decades, and I am a lucky and better woman for it. Happy anniversary, Rudi!

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I recently heard about a yuppie doughnut shop (this is shop where the doughnuts are fancy and cost the better part of a $5 bill apiece as opposed to the blue-collar doughnut shops I grew up with) in the Virginia suburbs, so Rudi and I headed over there last Sunday. A bonus to sampling them in September is that their fall menu included several cider doughnut variations. I’m pleased to report that their cider cake doughnut is the best in the MidAtlantic that I’ve had outside of a farm (and that their other doughnuts were equally tasty). Rudi and I have declared them our favorite of the local yuppie doughnut shops.

2. Several dvd holds came in for me at the library this week. Onward is the latest Pixar film, and it is the utterly charming (and a little weepy) story about two teen brothers who inherit their father’s magical staff and the quest they embark upon (using the older’s extensive roleplaying experience) to bring him back to life for a single day.

3. Karen and I got a chance to catch up earlier in the week for the first time in a couple months. It was really great to hear her voice.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My job gives me plenty of sick leave. Which meant even though work was only as far away as my sofa, I didn’t have to go to it for a couple days while I was feeling under the weather.

2. My dad made new cds, which arrived via post yesterday afternoon. Nothing makes recuperation better than new music.

3. A new restaurant opened in the neighborhood and did a one-day charitable soft launch, where they only charged $5 for entrees. Rudi went and picked some up for us, and my falafel bowl is waiting in the fridge for me to feel up to reheating it.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We waited out the evening shower in Trader Joe’s loading dock and headed back out as soon as the rain lightens. The storm moved through quickly and the clouds afterwards skittered across the sky like a rapidly turning kaleidoscope, attaching one to another and then splitting apart in new shapes and colors.

2. I ordered some new, highly discounted clothes a couple weeks ago and Friday the Post Office showed the package as delivered, even though it was nowhere to be found. At first I wasn’t worried — we’re a USPS family and I know sometimes things slide under seats, plus we fall at the end of our carrier’s route — but when it didn’t appear on Saturday and tracking hadn’t been updated, I filed a missing package report. (While we’ve never had packages stolen, we do live in a city and we know people who have.) Monday evening, the package showed up as if it was right on time, which, I suppose, it was.

3. We were out of bread products last week (by which I mean I hadn’t made bread and didn’t feel like running out to the bagel shop), so I opened a boxed chocolate chip pannetone we’ve had sitting around since the holidays. It’s okay toasted, but makes an amazing French toast, which is a very pleasant way to start a workday.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. In the last week, our local park and the fancy steps near it have been home to two proposals and one tiny wedding reception picnic. I don’t know how yesterday’s proposal went; we came from the same direction the beloved was expected from, so we didn’t have any clue until we got to the top of the steps, where there were signs saying “Proposal in progress. Please wait two minutes” on the ground and on the young man’s back.

2. I started a new book this week and it’s told from the first-person plural point of view. As an English major, I find this a fascinating choice for narration and less than a chapter in, I’m already invested in finding out what else the author has in store for me.

3. We had another mishap making ice cream this evening, where I decided to trust the one recipe I saw online that told me what I wanted to hear about timelines, rather than every other recipe that would have made us wait. I’ve learned from past mishaps, though, and just ladled some non-frozen ice cream into glasses and topped them with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and called them milkshakes instead. Tomorrow we’ll have ice cream.

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