Three beautiful things from this past week:

1. Swayed by a sign pointing the way to the local beach, Rudi and I made a surprise ten-minute stop at Savin Rock in West Haven, where we admired the full moonrise over the ocean and I dipped my toes in the chilly water. (I’ll post a picture tomorrow. I don’t want to get out of bed to get my phone.)

2. A letter arrives from a college friend from the Philippines and a postcard from Rhode Island.

3. My Bikeshare fob (a plastic sandwich with a computer chip dot as its meager filling) came apart six months ago and I’ve been using a hair elastic to keep it held together since then. (I should note here that Bikeshare would totally replace it for free if I told them about it. Which I will. At some point.) Last Sunday, as I heading into work, I realized the elastic had gotten yanked off the fob and the chip, which is smaller than my pinkie nail, was gone. A couple days later, Rudi looked down just outside the apartment door and saw my chip lying on the ground, unsquashed. It’s back in the fob and working once more.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The stunned look on my coworkers’ faces when I volunteered to come in early to work tomorrow to help prep for an event.

2. At a local bar, I order a drink off the dessert menu: a pineapple soda float.

3. While normally I am a huge fan of April baseball, even I admit that I was not looking forward to last Saturday’s game, which was forecast to be damp, cold, and windy. When they postpone the game until May, I am not sad.

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

I dozed off last night without posting, so here is a belated list of three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The strawberry plot in my garden is filled with violets. I pick a bunch to enjoy at home.

2. I screw up the time of an event and miss it. So instead I sit in the sun at a cafe with some chai and a piece of blueberry chocolate pie and read.

3. Rudi’s been under the weather this week and was particularly unhappy yesterday evening as I was leaving work. My go-to sick food comes out of a packet, but his is homemade chicken soup like his mom makes, which clearly I’m never going to prepare. So I stop at the Greek place near our house to pick up their homemade chicken soup for supper without telling him that was my plan.

And a bonus for being late:

4. One of the things I hate about ski season is that unused skis sit behind the door to our apartment and keep it from fully opening, which makes getting my bike in and out difficult. (This is less a problem in the dead cold of winter and more so when it starts to warm up a bit.) I arrive home from work one evening to find that the skis have been put away and the door opens wide once more.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi and I clear the garden of debris, turn the dirt, add some fresh soil, and plant peas and some random plants we pick up the local garden collective. Next, I need to plant my kitchen-weary potatoes and go through my seeds and decide what to plant where and when.

2. After 15 miles of cycling and a long day at work, I only mean to collapse on the bed for a few minutes. Instead, it’s a 2-hour nap.

3. Last weekend was gorgeous, and circumstances conspire to bring me up to the local park in the late afternoon. I eat lunch and read and peruse the Little Free Library selections and watch ecstatic pups and children romp in warm sunlight.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi finally came home.

2. Our vacuum cleaner died, but I’d never gotten rid of the 30-year-old hand-me-down from my grandmother (who’d never gotten rid of it after, I’m guessing, my mother gave her a newer, lighter model as a gift) after Rudi and I moved in together. It’s been sitting in my parents’ basement for 13 years, but now it’s sitting in our basement, sucking up cat fur and kitty litter.

3. Sarah and I went to see the Indigo Girls last week. I noticed that Emily, whose voice is normally beautifully high and clear and one of my favorites, was not sounding dissimilar from Johnny Cash’s waver on his final album. “Oh, no!” I thought. “She blew out her voice.” But she and Amy shared they’ve been sick and that Emily was currently on steroids. “I’m so sorry about my voice,” she bemoaned. I wanted to shout down to her that I was delighted she was sick, because that was so much better than the alternative, but that just seemed extremely rude and insensitive (and a way to guarantee that Sarah would never ask me to go with her to a show again).

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Sarah suggested not baking over the weekend and instead meeting up for dinner at our local pie restaurant on Monday. We got to ride the new streetcar to get there, and even though we had to wait in line for a while, a table opened up just before we ordered. It was a lovely way to celebrate Pi Day.

2. My single finished sock was sufficient to earn me a spot on the Sock Madness cheerleader team, which gets to knit the patterns at our own pace, applaud other competitor’s success, and generally enjoy the event without any of the stress of a deadline. It’s really a nice way to reward those who’ve lost, but made an effort.

3. For the first time in the history of D.C.’s metro subway system, they shut down the whole thing for an emergency inspection. After two electrical fires in the course of a year, the new GM decided it was in everyone’s best interest to do this. It turns out that he was right, with a horrifying number of serious fire hazards found and repaired on their down day. Many people were inconvenienced by the shut down (particularly low-income, hourly workers without their own mode of transportation or the ability to work offsite), but Capital Bikeshare offered free one-day memberships as an alternative, ran corrals in busy areas so riders didn’t have to find an empty dock to return a bike to, and asked members who own a bike (like me) to leave the communal bikes for those without. Their generosity allowed people to make more than 13,500 bike trips, many made by single-day users.

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