This week’s Three Beautiful Things is tardy because I’m feeling grumpy and did not particularly want to look for the beautiful out there in the world. But this is a passing phase (an insight I’ve gained over the years), so I will delay no more:

1. Today’s late lunch trip to the farm market netted me, among other things, a bouquet of pink sweet peas that are now making my office smell nice and a pint of shelling peas, which I shared with two co-workers. Betty said she hadn’t had any since she was five and had had her photo taken on her stoop happily eating some. And Sarah squealed with joy that I had left some of her favorite veggies on her desk.

2. I lost my sunglasses on the bike trip Sunday when they bounced out of my pannier sometime on the Ross Drive detour. Today’s gray weather means I’m not sitting outside squinting into the sun.

3. Normally I leave dirty dishes in the sink until there’s a whole sinkful of them. (For the record, this is not how I was raised.) And then I do a huge load all at once, but there are always more dishes than there is room in the rack so it doesn’t really seem like I’m making any headway. But yesterday morning I had the foresight to just finish off all the dish washing before I went to work, so I came home to an empty sink. It was a surprisingly nice feeling.

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. We took Gramma home on Monday on our way back to D.C., and she offered us a bite to eat while we were waiting out the traffic at her house. It started out as leftover soup she’d frozen. Then she brought out leftover frozen chicken for sandwiches, dug out some leftover stuffing, and remembered some leftover gravy. By the time she was done finding everything, Rudi and I had had quite a lovely feast. Why do our leftovers never taste so good? It must be the grandmotherly magic…

2. Spring in Connecticut is several weeks behind D.C., so I wasn’t really surprised to see violets still growing on Gramma’s lawn. But I was surprised to see the lilies of the valley growing in her garden. We don’t even have them down here yet — unless they went so quickly I missed them altogether. It’s really cool when you get to see your two favorite flowers at once.

3. After hunting around for a while and making Rudi hang out in the coat section of far too many Marshalls and T.J. Maxx stores, I found one up in Connecticut. It’s a peachy yellow with pretty pink flowers on it and doesn’t make me look like I’m wearing a frumpy bathrobe. I feel so cheerful in the rain now (D.C. obliged me by giving me two day’s worth of rain upon my return).

If it’s Thursday, it must be time for the Three Beautiful Things of the week:

1. The best follow-up to seeing a musical is having the cd to listen to and sing along with. It’s even nicer when they give you the cd for free at the show.

2. When I first started reading Le Divorce, I didn’t really enjoy it. The narrator was unreliable, and if I wanted an unreliable narrator, I wouldn’t bother to read; I’d just listen to politicians. But the nice thing is that as the book has gone on, I’ve come to like the narrator. She’s grown on me. If she were a real person, I wouldn’t want to spend all my time with her, but I would enjoy the periodic visits we did have.

3. The last few days we have been blessed with remarkably sunny, lovely weather. The sort of sunny weather that just demands that you have lunch outside, that you drink and read at outdoor cafés, that you have picnics, that you catnap in sunny spots, that you stroll everywhere with a silly smile on your face.

While I have always found things beautiful in the moment, chronicling them once a week has made me remember them longer and appreciate them more. Thanks, Clare, for inspiring the process.

Time for Three Beautiful Things Thursday…

1. So many people these days plant beautiful, long-lasting, fragrance-free roses, it is absolutely delightful to pause at the house a block and a half up from us where the roses run wild in their tiny yard. I admit I stop each and every time I walk past and stick my nose in their flowers. They must think me quite fresh.

2. One of the best things about my office is that we frequently have lunch meetings (one of the best things about my job is that I generally do not need to go to those meetings). After the attendees eat, the food is offered up to the rest of us. Today’s lunch was a vegetarian sandwich, cheese and crackers, Caesar salad, soda, and chocolate chip cookie.

3. On the iPod this morning, I got Vance Gilbert’s anguished “Takin’ It All to Tennessee,” where he completely captures the horribly selfish, yet completely devastated feeling you have when your friends are leaving you to move elsewhere: “Don’t you love me?” I also had Pink Martini’s “Una Notte a Napoli,” a Latin love song perfect for dancing from the Metro to the office. Add to that Tracy Grammer’s heartbroken delivery of her most recent songs, penned after the death of her beloved Dave Carter, and the ability of music to unite us becomes obvious.

In the spirit of being alliterative, here’s my Three Beautiful Things Thursday entry:

1. A family of four kittens lives in my neighborhood and Mama has been walking them through the top level of our window well, much to the frustration of Jeremiah. (I think she’s teaching them that if they get caught by people, they’ll end up in “kitty jail” like my cats seem to be.) Shortly after midnight, one straggled behind a bit and couldn’t figure out where Mama had disappeared to. I went outside to see if she was okay. She was a long haired tiger. So little, so cute, so loud! It hid under a bush after I stepped away, and Mama must have come back for it because we didn’t hear a peep after that.

2. There is nothing like the soft warmth of a polar fleece blanket on a chilly morning. The past few mornings have been chilly in the Burrow (it may have something to do with that open window in the living room, but I refuse to let go of the fresh air it brings). So it feels extra nice to wiggle my toes under the covers and have them encounter a snuggly blanket instead of the cold reality rising will eventually bring.

3. We have a monthly meeting that generally convenes at Ben’s Chili Bowl, a D.C. institution. We don’t visit other than that, but we’ve been going monthly for 18 months or so. One of the men behind the counter, David, knows us by sight and always stops us as we walk in. “I was asking them if you were coming,” he teased last night when we came in a few minutes late. We don’t have to stand in line anymore — he knows what we want. We just have to catch his eye and he puts food on for us. Certainly, it’s not a place where everybody knows our name, but one person does, and he’s always glad to see us. And we’re always glad to see him.

I stumbled across Clare’s site, Three Beautiful Things, last week and it strikes me that if I stopped to write down the things I noticed I might appreciate life just a tad more. So in that vein:

1. Pink flowers — The pink dogwood at the corner of the Moroccan embassy is blooming. Like the magnolia trees three weeks ago, it looks like tons of pink butterflies have alighted on the tree and it makes my walk to the Metro much more pleasant.

2. A cup of tea — I didn’t have time to brew a whole pot of tea this morning and the regular tea bags I have are meant for more than one cup. So I pulled down the tin of Earl Gray tea bags Gramma gave me a while back. It’s been a while since I had a cup of Earl Gray and I had forgotten how much I enjoy a well-made blend. Some blends incorporate too much bergamot, but this one was just right.

3. A chilly cat — Jeremiah, our black-and-white cat, has been on the peck recently and has been a bloody pain in the neck, blocking our other two cats’ ways, chasing after them, and just generally tearing up the place. But at night he curls up on us, balanced on both our hips. And in the morning, he is generally curled up next to my stomach. And this morning, when I needed to be getting up from my chair and getting ready for work, he came and sat on my lap and gave me such a look that I had to sit for a few more minutes just to not disrupt his nap.