It’s the weekend (and the last one we’ll spend in town for a while)! What am I hoping it includes?

• We’ve got tickets to the penultimate Nationals game of the year tomorrow evening. Our friend Sarah has the other two seats and is bringing one of her best college friends, whom I’m looking forward to meeting.
• There are a couple neighborhood street festivals and a concert in the park that could be fun to check out.
• I haven’t been to the garden in nearly a week, so I’d better go pick some tomatoes and peppers.
• I have a bag of apples I picked last weekend that would love to be baked.
• Mount Laundry threatens our very existence while we sleep. I should probably strive to turn it into a mere hill.
• A friend of Rudi’s is going to cat sit for us this month, which means that someone besides our handyman on an emergency basis is going to come into the apartment for the first time since before the pandemic. We have to do some cleaning.
• Sunday morning means the farmers market, even if I don’t really need anything.
• I’d like to put birthday cards for three friends into the mail. (I also need to get one of their most recent addresses.)
• I need to buy a plane ticket to Salt Lake. I should have bought it today at the latest.
• Doesn’t reading and knitting at a cafe in the autumn sun sound idyllic?

How about you? Do you have a relaxing weekend planned or one full of activity?

I have nine days to get through until I have a four-day weekend.

Saturday started with sleeping in, which I needed, but which also ate into my time outside. This is why it’s helpful to have a backyard or a beach. You can throw on a bare minimum of clothing and go back to sleep outdoors. But I did eventually get myself out and down to the garden, where my harvest included two sweet potatoes, most of the rest of this year’s basil, two types of sorrel, and several tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos,

I met up with Rudi and we took ourselves up to Petworth, to one of our local bookshops, which was having a sale. I bought the short story collection Black Boy Joy and a collection of poems written on bus commutes. After stopping by the house to feed the cat and drop off the car, we took ourselves out to Art All Night, the annual celebration of late-night art. We visited an embassy and an art space in our neighborhood and then metro’ed downtown to the park by my old office, which has been rehabbed for the past year. They’ve done a beautiful job of updating the space, and if they can find a way to let the homeless use it unimpeded, I’ll be totally pleased with their work. We ate some jollof rice from a Nigerian food truck, enjoyed some music, and then took ourselves off to the library.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library is our main library and reopened during the pandemic after a major renovation to the Mies Van der Rohe building. And after a public dedication during normal business hours, they opened it up for alternative programming for the festival, with juggling, community performances, a Black art pop-up, a film screening, and an outdoor hip hop show by Black Alley.

Today was chiller, with a trip to the farmers market and later to a farm, where I picked apples, and the Tonys concert. Overall, a good weekend, but over too soon.

How was yours?

As of today, the sun is setting at 7 here in D.C. I haven’t wrapped up work before that time all week, so I’m going to have to be very intentional starting this week to shut the computer at the time I’m supposed to, not at the time the work is actually done. (Because, to be honest, the work is never actually done.)

The weather is now pleasant enough to want to be out during daylight hours, so I’m going to need to get up earlier and try to get a walk or cup of tea in the park in before my workday begins. And then I’m going to need to scurry out to the garden or to the towpath for a bike ride or to the only cafe with evening hours on this side of town after it’s supposed to end. Because if I go straight through my favorite season without ever seeing the sun on weekdays, it’s going to be a huge problem.

I discovered a pull in my knitting tonight. It was on the wrong side, so conceivably I could have just stretched the fabric a little bit and then woven it under the stitches.

But instead I picked at the stitches with a spare needle, teasing the elongated loop in both directions until all the slack was gone.

It took more than an hour to accomplish, but I’m glad I took the time.

There’s a lesson there to apply to real life, where taking the time to relieve tiny increments of a major stressor eventually lead to the problem being solved. But that takes time and patience, and I really just want to weave in the threads and disguise the things that could take down the entire thing.