This was both a productive Bout of Books and weekend for me, and I just wanted to share a little about each before moving on to this week. (Writing a separate blog post for each should have been on my weekend to-do list, but alas!)

My goals for Bout of Books 17 were to finish three books, take part in four BoB activities, and visit two fellow participants a day. I’m happy to say I finished three books (The Heist, The Rest of Us Just Live Here, and Friday Barnes, Girl Detective), started a new audiobook (Boy Meets Boy), and put in some more mileage on a fourth book that I finished a couple hours after BoB finished. I took part in both Twitter chats, didn’t get around to any of the challenges, and blogged twice, which gets me across that finish line, just. I didn’t visit fellow participants every day, but did several days, so I’m counting that as a victory, too. All in all, another good Bout of Books! I’ll be back for the next one, which is in early January.

As for the weekend, on Saturday, I started the day with the Bout of Books Twitter chat. We were out of easy food, and I still had some blueberries in the fridge that were okay, so I made us pancakes for breakfast. I don’t particularly like pancakes without blueberries, but I’m fine with waffles, so I would have gone that route if we’d been without.

Rudi and I moseyed over to the 17th Street Festival, where we bought some baked goods from the senior citizens having a bake sale and a half-off gift certificate to a restaurant I’d been wanting to try. It was hot, though, so once we’d covered the three blocks, we decided to head to a local cafe and have cold drinks.

In the evening, we ordered a pizza and picked it up and took it up to Carter Barron Amphitheater, where they used to show free plays in the summer. The Shakespeare Theatre pointed out that it was not especially helpful to low-income residents in other sections of town to hold free productions out in the woods near the well-off neighborhoods, so have moved their free play to a more central, mass-transit friendly location. Unfortunately, no one else has stepped up to put on plays, free or otherwise, at the amphitheater since then. They do, however, show a couple movies during the final week of August every year, and on Saturday, it was The Lorax, which we hadn’t seen. Watching a movie about the spirit of the forest while surrounded by trees seemed appropriate. It was still early when we got home, so we concluded the night by saying farewell to Inspector Lewis.

On Sunday, we slept in, rising just in time to catch the moment of nature at the end of CBS Sunday Morning, before heading out to the farmers market. We ate a leisurely breakfast (edited to add: and I painted my toenails a sparkly purple), then we got in the car and headed out to the library, the grocery store, and the D.C. State Fair. We ran into a friend, enjoyed some music, ate some mediocre ice cream from a vendor, and sampled some quite good rhubarb pie, a finalist in its category. It was fun, but it was held in a paved lot, so it was doubly hot, and after an hour, we were cooked.

I dropped Rudi off at home and headed down to water the garden, pick basil for dinner, and float in the pool for an hour. We ate supper and watched Help!, and I knit on my sock. After Rudi went to bed, I finished the book I was reading and put the laundry on, concluding the weekend with clean clothes and a completed to-do list.

How was your weekend?

Recognizing we’re already partway into Saturday afternoon, here’s what I hope to accomplish this weekend:

• Participate in the Bout of Books Twitter chat Saturday morning.
• Make breakfast.
• Go to the 17th Street Festival.
• Picnic during The Lorax at the Carter Barron Amphitheater. (It’s possible that by picnic, I mean pizza, but I may mean more traditional picnic food instead.)
• Swim.
• Paint my toenails.
• Attend the D.C. State Fair. (They’ve moved this further away, so, with weekend track work and a gimpy Rudi, this one may not happen.)
• Shop at the farmers market.
• Pick up Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir, Another Brooklyn, at the library.
• Water the garden.
• Do laundry.
• Watch the final Inspector Lewis episode.

How about you? What’s on your weekend to-do list?

This weekend was a quiet, pictureless weekend filled with heat, heat, and more heat.

We watched the end of the Tour de France. It was an enjoyable bike race, and I’m now looking forward to the Olympics in a couple weeks’ time.

I went to the pool and enjoyed playing in the water. That’s where we were on Saturday evening, when a rainbow appeared in the sky.

We did some laundry. (We did not fold it and keep moving the lump of clean towels and blankets from the bed to the sofa. I assume we’ll deal with it properly tomorrow.)

I went to the farmers market and to the grocery store and to the library.

I picked our first larger-sized tomato from the garden. (We also grow currant tomatoes, which are roughly the same size as a pea.) It’s not fully ripe, but I lost two earlier in the week to either a squirrel or a hornworm, so wasn’t going to take any chances.

I read some (I’m two-thirds done with Modern Lovers, which is overdue.) and knit some (the shawl did not get finished by the time the Tour riders reached Paris, but I am in the stripes), but did neither enough.

We fixed the blender and had our first daiquiris in a couple years. We’re either out of grenadine or it’s hiding well in the back recesses of the fridge, and I forgot to buy whipped cream, but otherwise it was very good, and I had two glasses over the course of the weekend.

I did dishes and slept, and I’m now going to do them both again.

Weekending along with Karen and Carole:

1. Missed the thunderstorm and got to picnic with Shawn and Sarah. We saw gigantic catfish and ate ice cream cones.
2. 

   Witnessed nature’s fireworks (a good thing since the manmade ones ended up being canceled after the ballgame went late.

3. Picked up some books and my latest summer reading prize at the library.
4. 
   

   Read and ate doughnuts along the river with Rudi.

5. Started a new knitting project for the Tour de France knit along and watched a lot of bike racing.
6. Went to the farmers market.
7. 

   Pulled out imitation strawberries and other vines from my garden. Ate peas. Checked on the blackberries growing on the fence. (This week…)

8. Slept in.
9. Saw The BFG at the cinema. We both really liked it.
10. 

    Biked down to the Lincoln Memorial and watched the fireworks through the fog and drizzle. (If you were watching A Capitol Fourth, you saw fireworks from previous, clearer years.)

How was your holiday weekend?

So neither of my go-to Tuesday memes interested me today especially: I listen to audiobooks while knitting, driving, and doing the dishes, but prefer baseball games on the radio or music for most other tasks, and while I’ve read seven 2016 releases this year, I have yet to hand out five stars to any of them.

So instead, I’m going to answer the meme I was too busy vacationing last week to write about: 10 Things on This Summer’s Bucket List:

1. Visit Theodore Roosevelt Island. It’s three miles from my door (maybe less). I’m finally getting over there. Related: Visit Kingman Island on the other side of town.
2. Make ice cream, yogurt, or popsicles once a week. Related: play volleyball regularly.
3. Get to the pool or beach every week.
4. Take in an outdoor movie at least every other week, preferably every week. (This is my favorite way to catch up on recent releases to “video” and classics I’ve missed. Pending more weather, we’re catching Mister Roberts in our local park later this week.)
5. Read in our hammock. (I need to check if there are rules stating I can’t suspend things from trees in our closest park. I know I can take the portable stand one up there if I can dig it out of our building’s storage closet.)
6. Attend an outdoor concert. Something big would be nice, but I’d settle for one of the free Fort Reno shows.
7. Freeze fruit (and maybe veg) for the winter. (I like the idea of canning, but really need to work with things that require minimal storage/equipment.)
8. Eat picnic suppers outside once a week. Perhaps in conjunction with the movies, but maybe not.
9. Go to the midnight release party for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the book version of the script of the new West End play.
10. Finish two knitting projects. Any two.

How about you? What are you hoping to cross off your list this season?

Weekending with Karen at Pumpkin Sunrise and Ten on Tuesday’ing with Carole at Carole Knits:

1. The weekend began with our traditional Friday night picnic by the waterfront. We were more together than usual, which meant that Michael and Julia had brought an entree and Rudi and I had brought dessert, in addition to the other drinks and tapas we usually make a meal out of.
2. I got up early on Saturday to bike down to the sand courts near the Lincoln Memorial to play volleyball with some of the folks from the team I’ve been playing with. I did not get up early enough to eat breakfast beforehand, which was not a mistake I should make again.
3. Sarah and I then headed out to the countryside to pick strawberries. It was 90 degrees and humid and brightly sunny. We picked for an hour, and we were drained by the end of it. I came home with about four quarts of berries.
4. I stopped at the local garden center/co-op place and picked up some more basil, since mine vanished, thanks, I assume, to the slugs.
5. I went to the park to hang out and read, but instead fell fast asleep in the shade after I finished my mango lassi. A nap was precisely what the rest of the day demanded.
6. On Sunday, we got up and watched the final stage of the Giro d’Italia (similar to the Tour de France in bike racing importance and difficulty, but set in Italy and less famous) and a couple bits of CBS Sunday Morning.
7. We then headed out to the farmers market.
8. Later in the day, we went to the local pool, which opened this weekend for the season.
9. Today, we slept in. It was glorious.
10. I went to the garden and planted the latest round of vegetation. I also harvested a handful of strawberries and strung some string trellises for my peas.
11. We ended the weekend by watching Love and Mercy, the Brian Wilson biopic from last year. It wasn’t really my thing, but I could appreciate that it was well done.

That’s one more than called for by Carole, but long weekends were made to break the rules.

How about you? How was your (long) weekend?