Another Thursday come and gone. Let’s look back at three beautiful things from the past week:

1. I need to get home quickly, and the cabbie who picks me up gets me there quickly, despite potential traffic snarls.

2. Quince, when cooked, turn from an apple-flesh white to a rosy hue. (They also smell delicious when poached with a vanilla bean.)

3. My winter volleyball team (to differentiate them from the folks I played with this fall) cheerfully heads out for drinks after our game. The matches themselves were not particularly good, so it’s especially refreshing that we all end the evening on a positive note.

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

Three beautiful things from the week that marked our ninth anniversary of moving to D.C.:

1. Several events have conspired to make it mandatory that I go to the DMV inspection station the final Friday morning of the month — one of the days they instruct you to avoid at all costs. I wake to rain, but without a choice in the matter, head across town, feeling more than a little grim about the likely wait. But instead of a crowd, I find myself able to drive right up to the building, and my car has its pass sticker in less than five minutes.

2. The bus driver greets all the passengers getting on the bus and cheerfully chats with each of the senior citizens, asking about details of their lives. He’s just the sort of bus driver that Sesame Street and Richard Scarry brought me up to expect.

3. Three sunny days in a row, my coworker Sarah and I leave our desks and go outside. Twice we sit and eat lunch and talk about things that have nothing to do with work. It’s been a long time.

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

It’s Thursday. I’m not sure how it arrived already, because I’m pretty sure it ought to be Tuesday. However, as tomorrow definitely ought to be Friday, I’m not going to argue the point.

In the meantime, three beautiful things from the past week:

1. We head down to the West End Cinemas and catch the French film Le Havre, which is a feel-good (but not in a treacly way) movie about how a shoe-shiner and his down-and-out neighborhood is touched by an African boy who stowed away on and escaped from a container originally destined for London.

2. Craig Finn, who is the lead singer of Hold Steady, released a solo album this week, and it is fantastic. Clear Heart Full Eyes is filled with melodic stories about the sort of people you’d find at a bar late at night in a small town where life is passing them by. It’s not filled with only depressing songs, although he has enough of those to blow a hole cleanly through your heart if you’re teetering in the wrong direction or to score a film about lost twenty-somethings. But he also has a humorous way with words, which gives you some gems like “New Friend Jesus,” which features such lines as “It’s hard to suck when Jesus is in your band” and “People say we suck at sports, but they don’t understand it’s hard to catch with holes right through your hands.” You can stream the album for free at least through Saturday if you’d like to sample it. (I’m not sure when Spinner switches over to the next week’s new releases.)

3. The weather must be particularly mild this week, because in addition to the spring bulbs popping up suddenly (so wrong!), I’ve also been seeing droves of daycare providers out walking their waist-high charges. Some hold hands with adults. Some clutch a long rope. Some wear orange safety vests that are adorably wee. And I’ve seen an assortment of animal-themed headwear, but that, I’m sure, has nothing to do with the daycare centers themselves.

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

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. On our last day in Salt Lake, we awake to snow. It continues floating down off and on all afternoon, making us feel like we’re living in a snowglobe.

2. I have unsuccessfully been hunting for a new pair of jeans for a while now. The Fred Meyers that is no longer Fred Meyers helps me out with a pair of Lees (and two pairs of Valentine’s Day socks).

3. Sarah, Amani, and I have dinner. The three of us haven’t gotten together in a while and are having such a good time chatting that it is nearly midnight before I catch Bikeshare home.

And as a bonus beautiful things, Rudi suggests you all might enjoy seeing the boys hanging out together:

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

Oops. I meant to finish working on the last item yesterday while we were traveling, but then airport misadventures meant that Rudi and I took entirely different routes to Salt Lake and the computer went with him. By the time we both arrived, I was pretty knackered and forgot computers existed, let alone that I had a blog post to finish.

But here, a day late, are three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Taking down the Christmas tree means the living room feels spacious.

2. “I’m speaking duck,” a boy tells his parents at the Georgetown park.

3. Rudi and I messed up our flight yesterday morning. Rudi overslept slightly and I caused us to leave the house late, which meant that we did not have the time necessary to recover from subsequent bad decision-making caused by a lack of sleep. So when our plane left, we were not on it. But every single Southwest person we talked to yesterday — and we conversed with a bunch of them — were pleasant and helpful and kind. I don’t know what sort of training they do with their workers — or if they make special efforts only to hire exceptional people in the first place — but it’s really working, and these two tired, sheepish, stressed out travelers were remarkably grateful.

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

The first Thursday of a new year brings a fresh opportunity to highlight some beauty of both the outgoing and incoming calendars. Here are just three such moments from the past week:

1. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are so unseasonably warm it encourages spending time outdoors. We bike to and from the cinema for our annual film watching marathon, and we spend most of our time at Michael and Julia’s open house sitting on their deck.

2. Before the second of our New Year’s Eve movies, someone from the movie theater comes in and describes their upcoming features in an excited kind of way. It feels very homey, and, as Sarah said, alerts us that the staff are film aficionados.

3. Up early for a meeting, I am toasting an English muffin and doing something else at the same time when I turn around to discover that my toaster oven is on fire (we apparently hadn’t emptied the crumb catch in a really long time; that’s now been remedied). Because I am right there, I can blow it out, and the sirens that stop at our intersection not five minutes later are not for us.

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