Today rolled around far too early with a morning meeting and a profound lack of sleep. Where is the sun? I feel like I could wake up if the sun would ever come back…

While we’re waiting, though, let’s contemplate three of the beautiful things from the past week:

1. At the end of the day, a man walks down 13th Street past Franklin Square juggling pins. Every few tosses, a pin falls to the ground.

2. Sunday morning, it is raining. The small tree outside our house has droplets of water clinging to every leaf bud.

3. Our garden plot is in a larger area of parkland that is far enough off the street that owners feel safe bringing their dogs there to play off-lead. A person throws a ball and suddenly two greyhounds are off! First one has the ball. They dash in a different direction! And back! And forth!

And to compensate for the lack of sunhine, I offer us all a fourth beautiful thing:

4. Kim and Rebecca both send me emails yesterday. Kim includes an eye-crinklingly adorable sound clip of her and her son, Thomas, singing “C Is for Cookie.” And Rebecca sent me photos of her son wearing his first Mariners gear and being cuddled by his new parents. I can’t tell you what lovely additions these were to my inbox.

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Thursday, we got an early jump on our departure for Connecticut. It was lovely to walk into my parents’ house before midnight. An early bedtime meant that I had plenty of time on Friday morning to spend with Gramma and Mum and Dad before the day got too busy.

2. Last weekend was a chance to reconnect with many of our friends from the Northeast. I chatted with BW on the drive north. The next evening, John (and his wife Kim), Di, and Shelley and Mike joined us for our annual Good Friday pizza dinner at Modern. Then we caught up with ECN, who was feeling too under-the-weather to join us for dinner but who graciously allowed us to stop by afterwards. And on Saturday, Karen and I got to spend the afternoon together eating Vietnamese food, drinking scary bubble tea, and talking for hours. I love how flexible friendship is — that it can stretch through time and space and still resume its comfortable and reassuring shape.

3. Usually my headphones go on pretty early in my commute to work. I find listening to music or a podcast lessens how jarring the transition from home life to work life is to this night owl. But this morning, I was a bit slow with the ear buds and instead got to hear an avian symphony of calls and songs as the neighborhood birds reminded me that, despite the cold, they knew it to be spring.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for a look back at three beautiful things from the past week. If you enjoy this feature, consider checking out the original, where Clare records moments of beauty every day.

1. Walking back to my office from the bank on Monday, I pass a woman walking two standard poodles. The dogs, who were remarkably well trained, had their leashes harnessed together so they reminded me of an offbeat sled-dog team.

2. Rudi and I rode our bikes to RFK for the ball game Tuesday night. As we rode through Lincoln Park, the winds whipped the cherry trees, causing petals to fly through the night air like a snow squall.

3. Ejbro, who came to visit this weekend, is vegan and is, therefore, understandably delighted by our local vegan bakery. I’ve not been enamored, finding that the things I’ve tried on previous visits were too sweet and just didn’t taste right. This time, he steered me toward the sticky bun, which was delicious and could have passed for a legitimate baked good complete with butter and eggs. Yum!

The number one thing on this week’s three beautiful things list nearly knocked everything else off. It’s worth three items, just in itself:

1. One of my best friends from college phoned last night to tell me that they’d finally received their adoption referral. A woman, just our age, dropped off her darling baby boy at an orphanage in Guatemala City last Friday, four days after he was born. Rebs and Rick are overjoyed, as are both families, for whom this will be the first grandson. I can’t imagine how hard that decision must have been for the woman, but I hope she will sleep well at night because Rebs is going to be an unbelievable mommy to this dearly desired child. She is kind and playful and disciplined — and filled beyond brimming with love. I’m over the moon with delight for them all and must now get busy knitting baby items.

2. I sat outside reading after work Tuesday afternoon in the 80+ degree weather. I shifted slightly in my seat and realized there was the most gorgeous sunset going on over my shoulder — blue intensifying to vibrant purple streaked with magenta and ending with brilliant oranges and pinks near where the sun danced with the horizon.

3. Well-written tv shows are hard to come by these days, and those that exist tend to focus on an ensemble cast. To have a show that focuses on a single character — and to pull it off — is nearly unheard of. But Raines, a new character drama featuring Jeff Goldblum, does just that. He plays Michael Raines, a California police detective whose overactive brain causes him to imagine his murder victims come to life. He’s brilliant and troubled and tetchy — but in a lovable way. I hope the show is picked up for a full season next year — and that the writing and acting remains so strong.

If it’s Thursday, it’s time for Three Beautiful Things. You know how we play…

1. Sunday night, I volunteered to cook dinner and baked a quiche. Because we lack counter space, things were piled dangerously on the stove and on the counter below our cupboards. I reached up to pull out a pie plate and accidentally knocked the huge sauce pot off its wall hanger by tapping it wrong with the cabinet door. The pot fell, pulling the light’s plug out of the wall, but not the light from its mooring. The stove was spared the pot, but was attacked from the cabinet above with falling bakeware. The pot bounced on the floor, scattering glass bottles waiting to be taken to the recycling bin like bowling pins. The clatter was overwhelming, easily using up one of Jeremiah’s lives (and possibly one of my own), but nothing — not a single thing — broke.

2. I ordered lunch, complete with chocolate cake, for a work event Monday afternoon. The caterer assured me that a cake was no problem, and my boss picked out chocolate when asked what she preferred. The delight we ended up with was a four-layer extravaganza interspersed with chocolate mousse and topped with ganache. It was simultaneously sinfully rich and deceptively light and may be the best chocolate cake I’ve ever had.

3. I enjoy listening to Craftlit, a podcast for literature and craft lovers. Heather, the podcaster and a former English teacher, spends the first half of each episode talking about crafts and her life and setting up the second half, which features public domain literature read aloud as part of the Librivox program. Today I was listening to a show she aired last month that included a Mark Twain short story “Taming the Bicycle,” read aloud by a Twain impersonator.

Here’s an excerpt:

Even when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me practice. They all liked to see me practice, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog.

Hilarious. I laughed the whole two-plus miles home.

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. It being nice enough out to walk both to and from work (particularly when there are delays on the metro). I particularly like passing the magnolia trees that are starting to bloom in front of the Phillips.

2. Getting tickets to two of the three Mets-Nationals series when parceling out the season package.

3. Rudi made sweet potato fries to go with our burgers last night, just when I was really craving salt.

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