As you know, Thursday means it’s time for Three Beautiful Things from the past week:

1. Birds make funny noises as they splash in the ever-present puddle near the community garden. They sound like a hand-cranked egg beater.

2. Lilacs, poppies, peonies, and roses bloomed this week. These are not some of Mother Nature’s shyer children.

3. Twenty years ago, I was just finishing up seventh grade. I was at that particular age when a movie can become part of the intrinsic fabric of your life, and for me, that movie was Dirty Dancing. Last night they brought the movie back to the big screen (I saw it on video with my parents the first time around) and added a new documentary that interviewed some of the people (not the stars) responsible for creating the movie and highlighted the stage show production. Sweetpea, her roommate, a couple other people, and I headed over to the wilds of Virginia to sink back into teenaged nostalgia for a night. Yes, the movie is a bit cheesy, but that’s fine. (And, Sweetpea, Patrick Swayze was 35 and Jennifer Grey was 27 when the film came out.) Going to see it in a theater filled with women in their 30s and late 20s really did make for a fun experience. It was a fantastic night. Not quite the time of my life, but you understand…

Stay tuned for another post later today featuring a whole box of beautiful things from Emily. I wrote the post last night but hit a wall before I could put the links in to the photos. I’ll remedy that after work!

How is it Thursday already? How is it not the weekend yet? How can both of these statements be true?

My brain will self-destruct if I continue to consider the question, so let’s instead think back to three beautiful things from the last week:

1. When dogwoods flower, their blooms are larger than their leaves, so you really notice them first. I don’t know of other flowers that act like that. Usually I see the leaves first and have to wait impatiently for the blooms to appear.

2. The electric kettle at work is broken and I haven’t gotten around to ordering a new one quite yet. But we have a heated water tap and a microwave, so it shouldn’t have been a problem. Except that somehow the switch on the back of the water filtration system that allows the water to be heated had been turned off and no one noticed. Yesterday a co-worker set it right, so this afternoon I had a cuppa to celebrate. Today is particularly chilly, so the heat is greatly appreciated.

3. I was walking home from the Metro the other afternoon when, suddenly, from under my ear buds, I heard my name being called. I looked around, surprised, and discovered my friend Susan sitting in a car’s passenger seat, eating her supper. She had been waiting for a shop to finish something for her and happened to notice me wandering past. I’m glad she called out, because I never would have noticed her!

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.