Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I baked mint sticks to take to my bookclub and the librarian who runs it gushed over them. I left the tin for her to share with her colleagues, and Rudi and I nibbled on the edges I trimmed off for dessert.

2. A dapper fellow wearing a violet bowler hat and a matching pocket square was on the train one evening. In his lap — a tiny, metallic giraffe backpack.

3. Leaving the best for last — Rudi is home after ten days away. It’s been nice to have him here to talk with more than once a day and to help me deal with household things and to climb into bed next to him at the end of the day. Plus, it’s way easier to hold hands when you’re in the same zip code.

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

I just spent the past 12 hours doing flood control. It was only that long because in doing flood damage control, I discovered that ants had moved in and set up nests along the 10-foot length of the dry bag I’d left there all winter to cut down on flood damage. Thousands of ants. Karen called and asked if it was possible I was exaggerating. I was not.

The good news is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend or something like that, and the groundwater incursion took care of a surprising number of ants. My supposedly environmentally friendly cleaner also was a surprisingly effective tool of mass death. (I hate insect swarms because I feel really bad about having to kill them. But there’s really no getting around that with ants.)

Sadly, ants are not an easily defeated foe, so I am aware that the next few days I will need to remain vigilant and set up checkpoints and demand IDs. There will be no masquerading as the smallish spiders I let live in my corners. (Imagine how much worse it would have been if the spiders hadn’t been there!) And I have left the furniture in that part of the room askew to make checking the baseboards easier.

But we can’t end on that kind of note. Let’s look back at three beautiful things from our week in order to conclude the night in a more positive headspace:

1. The Thai place by my house makes very good (emergency) takeout.

2. Our friend Sarah kindly lent us her car so I could take Rudi to the Baltimore airport early last Friday. Because his flight left before dawn, I was back just as the pretzel bakery by her house was opening and got to enjoy very tasty treats — their specialty drink is a hot Nutella — early in the day.

3. No obvious signs of life yet amongst the peas I’ve planted in the garden, but when I tucked a few of them back into the ground, I noticed they’d grown roots, which is also true of the onion or shallot bulbs I planted last fall.

How about you? Tell me what’s been beautiful in your world this week!

If it’s Thursday, it’s time to reflect back on three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Rudi brought home cherry pie for Pi Day.

2. A college friend who has returned home to the Philippines and I exchange snail mail on an annual basis. He wrote this week to ask if my address was still the same, so I know his missive is on the way and that I should practice deciphering cryptic hieroglyphics in order to be able to read his scrawl.

3. I was in a neighborhood I don’t tend to frequent during the day and stopped in at a stationer/chocolatier, since they were open. The owner invited me to sample one of her handmade brigadeiros (sort of a Brazilian truffle) to encourage me to stop back. (It was walnut and was divine. And I will.)

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

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Three beautiful things from this past week:

1. The librarian at the info desk was so patient with an older woman who’d recently added a Kindle to her life. He answered her questions (including, “Is it a phone?”), let her use his computer to access Amazon, and even read her the Captcha on the login.

2. The National Park Service announced their first stab at the dates for the peak cherry blossom season. They refine it based on the upcoming weather, but right now it’s set for the very beginning of April.

3. The bikeshare dock by the metro station nearest my book club had one of the system’s e-assist bikes, which I greatly appreciated, since the road to the library was cold and uphill and I was a little later than I’d hoped to be.

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

It’s Thursday, which means it’s time to reflect back on three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The librarian who runs my Twitter book group and I had a nice chat and she mentioned a volunteer program she’s starting that she’d like me to take part in.

2. I took a road trip yesterday to a garden center out in the ‘burbs to buy a grow lamp and came home with pea packets and lily of the valley rhizomes, which I took to the garden this afternoon and planted. (I did a little plot tidying while I was there and discovered the bulbs I planted last year seem to be doing well!)

3. A huge box arrived this afternoon, filled with the eight-plus pounds of tea we consume in a year, purchased earlier this week during my New York tea supplier’s annual sale. I just emptied the last leaves from the 2018 purchases into my tins at the start of the week, so its delivery was particularly timely.

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

Three beautiful things from the week after my birthday:

1. I headed up to Politics and Prose on Monday for the American launch of Jasper Fforde’s new book, Early Riser. He was hilarious, as always, warning us that while all his previous books had taken approximately 120 days to write this one had taken 600. “Unfortunately, it is not six times better than my previous books.”

2. Rudi learned Sunday night that he’d been honored at his bicycle club’s annual meeting (which he’d had to miss because of his ski coaching obligations) with the Peter LeGrand Good Shepherd Award for being an outstanding ride leader. Apparently he was nominated by 14 members of the club for his weekly spring/summer ride and for being both fair and “a hardass.” (He leads a popular multi-level ride through northwest D.C. and nearby Maryland during the tail end of the evening rush hour, so he sets and enforces really strict rules about how participants should behave on the road.)

3. I was so caught up in the daffodil watch that I didn’t notice we’d had some other bulbs bloom in the neighborhood this week. (Heading to Georgetown this weekend to check out Book Hill…)

And a bonus, just because:

4. My (belated) birthday cake turned out great (I added a drop of food coloring to the filling to make it pink to play up the Valentine’s connection):

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