Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The volleyball team has worked on leveling up together, meaning nearly all of us are better than we were at the start of the season. We chased down balls we would have let drop, we blocked shots, and we made smart hits to beat a really solid team this week, moving us up into third in our league to end the regular season and making for a very merry gathering afterwards.

2. We arrived in Salt Lake this morning and while Rudi was getting his hair cut, I checked out a new-to-me tea house. The single-estate Assam tea from Kenya I tried was wonderful.

3. We saw A Strange Loop, a musical about a gay Black playwright struggling with his inner critics and his familial expectations, in New York City last weekend and found it deserving of every award it has won. The acting was outstanding, the lyrics moving and cheeky by turn, and the mostly minimal staging effective. I will need to read the libretto at some point, because there are seven people on stage nearly all the time and some of them singing over each other, which means I definitely didn’t catch everything that was going on.

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

Eighteen months ago, I started a list of 50 things I wanted to try or do by the time I turned 50, three years off at that time.

I haven’t looked at the list in more than a year, when I’d gotten it up to 30 items which ranged from the monumental — clear our Rudi’s mom’s house — to the more mundane — grow something new in the garden each year. So tonight I opened up the document, checked off the things I could say I’d done definitively, noted ones that were in progress, added another dozen items to the list, and identified 12 I’d work on in the next six months.

I won’t share all of them here, but here’s half the list:

• Have a job where I don’t hate Mondays
• Write two of my favorite teachers from growing up
• Hang our art
• Read a novel by a Russian
• Win a volleyball league championship
• Get caught up on or rip out all my partially started knitting projects

Do you make plans or resolutions for your birthdays, particularly round ones?

Rudi is away this week, but I still have a full list of things to do while he’s out west:

• Apply for a couple jobs I saved last week. (The three-month sabbatical I gave myself to lounge around is over, and now I need to start lining something up for the fall.)
• Clean the apartment. (Yes, technically this should be a two-person job, but I think we each find it easier to make progress if only one of us does the work at a time. Plus, I have a friend I’d like to have over for the first time, and I’d like not to have him back away slowly when I open the door. It was much easier when I lived in a dorm and my messy room was just open to the world all the time.)
• Acquire quarters, so I can make progress on Mount Laundry.
• Finish a couple books. (I have at least three that are overdue.)
• Keep plugging away on my shawl. (Honestly, the brioche is slower going than I expected it would be, but I like it so far.)
• Talk with some friends. (We’ve let it go too long.)
• Pick tomatoes in the garden. (I’ve already eaten the first cherry tomatoes of the season. Sweet!)
• Hang out with the volleyball team.
• Work on my Camp NaNoWriMo writing project. I made almost no progress last week, but am confident that I can get myself back on track.
• Bake.
• Finalize my #GiftmasinJuly package, so I can get it out the door by early next week.
• Swim.
• Spend time outside.

A baker’s dozen of chores, must-do’s, and fun things. What are you hoping to do this week?

My weekend was lovely, filled with many of the people I love best in D.C.

Friday night, six of us who used start our summer weekends together pre-pandemic returned to Yards Park for a concert and picnic. As one of them noted, we’re going on 20 years of friendship, which seems like a surprising number given we were brought together by volunteering for a political campaign.

Saturday afternoon, I got a chance to play volleyball for a couple hours, which was nice. Then I headed out for the evening to a friend’s engagement party. Turns out my volleyball teammates are happy to hang until the wee hours, because most of us didn’t leave until going on 1 a.m.

We also had a friend in town from London, whom Rudi spent most of his weekend with. But I caught up with them for supper tonight. We hadn’t seen him in person in 14 years, but would catch up for video chats at the Super Bowl and on other occasions. (He called us the night of the 2016 election to offer his condolences.)

Honestly, I love weekends like this. I love spending time with friends and having something to do each night, even if I need to recharge a bit the next day.

How was your weekend?

It was a nice weekend. I won a contest that netted me a free bucket of beer and a picnic blanket at the Friday night concert down along the River, so Rudi and I biked across town, met up with a volleyball teammate, and spent a beautiful evening listening to a Latin-Irish fusion band, which had a great sound.

Saturday, we went to the March for Our Lives down on the Mall, and while I’m sure our presence wasn’t the tipping point, it does sound like some progress was made overnight toward reaching a passable bill.

Today, I went to the farmers market, spent several hours working in the garden, had a video chat with friends, and watched the Tonys. Because airfare is outrageous right now, I proposed to Rudi that we take a couple overnight trips to New York City, so we procured tickets to three shows over the next two months. We’ve also been talking about seeing the Mets play at Citi Field (we haven’t been since they shut down Shea), so we might wrap that or Shakespeare in Central Park into the mix. Or maybe we can convince one or more of our friends in the area to meet up with us for a meal.

I missed the local peonies at the farmers market, but Trader Joe’s had my back. They have a place of honor in the living room.