I can’t seem to keep track of days this week. Here are three beautiful things from the past seven days:

1. It’s nice to be home where although not everyone puts milk in their tea, they have heard of the concept and ask if you want room left when they pour it for you at coffee shops.

2. While I was away, Rudi drafted our baseball season tickets. He did a great job — we’re going to see the Mets three times, an afternoon game in April, and some other fun games. I can’t wait.

3. When I left work tonight just before six, the sky was still a deep, dark shade of blue. I marvelled at it as I walked along, trying to figure out what color Crayola it would match. Eventually, it hit me — midnight blue. It was gorgeous — and a nice reminder that it won’t be too long before the sun is still out when I head home.

A special three beautiful things from my first 24 hours in San Antonio:

1. I woke up briefly on the flight from D.C. to Dallas and happened to look over my shoulder to see the sun rising behind me on the other side of the plane. If you think sunrises are pretty on the ground, you should definitely try them at 30,000 feet.

2. The temperature yesterday in San Antonio was in the mid-70s. I was able to walk around in a t-shirt.

3. We were accidentally refunded our payment on the booth we ordered for the conference we’re attending. After Heather and I set the booth up, she went to go back to her hotel, and I, who had the company credit card info, went to repay for our space. When I arrived at the right spot, it turned out they’d ordered lunch for the exhibitors. So Heather and I managed to get a free lunch out of the deal.

Today is the last day before I head to San Antonio for a conference. Here are three beautiful things from the last week:

1. Our friend Brian sent us a Christmas card this week. I had lamented to Rudi that a number of our college-era friends seemed to have fallen off the communication wagon this year — and then his card arrived to let us know that he was alive and well (and reading our blogs).

2. We went out Monday night to a popular local coffee house and found it packed — so we moved on to another, newer spot. The restaurant itself was merely okay (although it holds a lot of potential), but along the way we passed a tree whose buds had popped out because of the warm January weather we’ve had recently. The branches offered a beautifully lacy silhouette against the night sky.

3. I’m hard at work on my sock and am pleased with my progress, despite the mistakes I’ve made. Several other women in my knitting group are working on socks as well and they’re all impressed with the yarn I’m using because it stripes up in a lovely way. Some yarns that purport to be self-striping tend to make the colors pool (bunch up in odd ways) once you start knitting with it, but this yarn gives me a variety of blue stripes up and down my sock.

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. At Tuesday’s knitting group, I finally got around to that sock I started knitting a year ago before I got distracted by knitting things for other people. I had made a notation of where I had left off, but I knew that before I could begin I needed to replace one of the needles (because it was cracked and sock yarn is too thin to be forgiving of snags) and to move the stitches I had accidentally placed on the wrong needle. After I did both those things (and then did them again when I realized that I had moved the stitches over backwards, making it impossible to keep knitting), I couldn’t remember exactly how to knit using two circular needles. But then I remembered. And that felt so good.

2. This morning during the walk to the Metro, I was brought to a metaphysical standstill by the smell of earth. For those of you from warm climes, the smell of earth probably means little. But to me, coming from the cold Northeast originally, the smell of earth in mid-January offers the promise that spring will eventually arrive. Of course, a rainstorm followed by a sunny day in the sixties doesn’t hurt as a reminder, either.

3. Every review I read of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was great, so I bought a copy to read on a business trip a few years back. It was okay, but definitely not worth the accolades — its only real claim to originality was to set the plot in Africa and to feature an African woman as the sleuth. Just didn’t do it for me. But this week, when I went to the library, I saw a book from another of his series sitting amidst the new releases. This is why libraries exist after all — to pick up a book by an author that you might not like and don’t want to spend money on. I rationalized that while I liked M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth books, I’m not all that crazy about her Agatha Raisin series, and this could be a similar situation. I’m about halfway through The Sunday Philosophy Club, the first book in Smith’s second series, and am finding that I’m enjoying it much more than than the other.

It doesn’t feel like Thursday, but my calendar says it is. This week’s Three Beautiful Things:

1. I stopped at the store and bought something small today so I would have cash to go to lunch with some coworkers. Because I had cash, I was able to pay my portion and head back to the office instead of having to wait to sign a credit card slip and getting stuck in the elevator for an hour with seven other colleagues.

2. I had from 3 p.m. on Friday until 8:30 Tuesday morning off from work. Days stretched out in front of me luxuriously. I slept in. I didn’t put on a bra. I drank huge amounts of tea and ate lots of chocolate. I made waffles. Rudi and I saw lots of movies and lots of Britcoms. I could get used to the three-day weekend after the three-day workweek.

3. Rudi gave me The Princess Bride for Christmas and we watched it last night. From beginning to end, I enjoyed the whole movie — once again. It’s one of the few I can pretty much recite from start to finish (because it was a popular sound byte source for computer activity my sophomore year in college).

I meant to write a special Christmas edition of Three Beautiful Things, but instead took the holidays off. So I offer this to you today, intead:

1. Mum spent the holidays running around dusting off various surfaces again and again in the aftermath of a construction project that sent swirls of dust blowing through her house. But Christmas night, her hutch was covered once again with a fine layer of dust. But this time it was glittery dust blown down from the silver Christmas tree in front of the mirror.

2. A few Christmas cards did not find their way to the Burrow this year: one because my cousins didn’t have my address and two because the post office did not want to recognize “The Burrow” as an official address. But the cards found us instead at Turkey Ridge before we left to head home again. So we got the good fortune to have cards delivered to us at two locations!

3. The route we take through New Jersey on our drive from the Burrow to Turkey Ridge takes us through a number of neighborhoods, particularly around Newark. In bad years, the people in these neighborhoods do the holiday justice with their Christmas lights. But in good years (as I thought this one was for light displays), they went above and beyond. For a state that the rest of the Northeast ridicules for its ugliness ( and let’s face it, the area around the Turnpike is), New Jersey sure knows how to do Christmas decorations up right. Rudi and I point them out to each other: “Look! Christmas!”