By my weekend’s to-do list, I’ve had great success. We swam, watched Endeavour before we missed out on it, saw some of the Apollo 11 festivities, and enjoyed Hamlet. I bought eggs and milk and a bag of heirloom tomatoes at the farmers market (among other things) and cat food and Oreos at the store. We watered the garden and picked everything ripe. (I’ll have to weed later in the week when the cool weather returns, since apparently weeds, like tomatoes, really enjoy heat waves.)

I ripped out the last four rows of the shawl to get back to the right number of stitches, listening to Peter Mayle’s The Vintage Caper while doing so. I am 16 rows away from finishing the first third of the shawl. I wonder how many more times I’ll have to knit them!

And I even found the title to my car, among other things.

But now the Burrow looks like it suffered through an earthquake with everything strewn about. Putting the apartment to rights will be high on this week’s to-do list when I’m not out doing other, more interesting things, like going to a baseball game and playing volleyball and enjoying a beautiful forecast. Which, honestly, possibly means the apartment is going to look a lot like this for the rest of the week. But I will at least tidy up some of the mess because two adults (and an adult cat) do live here after all.

…

Yeah, I laughed, too.

Honestly, my weekend plan should just be not to move any more than absolutely necessary. However, that doesn’t really seem like an enjoyable use of my weekend, so instead, I’m going to:

• Water the garden, because Mother Nature has not been helping me out.
• Buy milk and eggs at the farmers market.
• Swim, because that’s the only thing that makes sense in this crazy heat.
• Catch some of the Apollo 11 festivities down on the Mall.
• Watch The Bookshop, which I have out from the library, and the last episode from Endeavour, before it goes behind PBS’ paywall.
• Take in the final performance of Hamlet, this year’s Shakespeare Theatre’s Free for All.
• Organize the apartment.
• Purchase cat food.
• Figure out where the extra stitch came from in the latest row of my shawl.
• Start reading There There or, conversely, finish one of the many books I’m already partway through.

How about you? what are you going to do this weekend?

The weekend was a nice one. It included a Tour de France watching party at a bar in Virginia with Rudi’s bike club on Friday; trips to the garden, library, grocery store, bagel shop; and farmers market; time in the pool; and a delicious Bastille Day supper of vegetarian crepes, chevre and crackers, and creamsicle ice cream.

There was reading and knitting and cuddling with the cat. There was a bike ride and holding hands and lounging on a bench at the park.

All in all, a pleasant way to pass a couple days in the middle of July, wouldn’t you say?

I’m surprisingly tired, so I’m going to post this quickly, wash the handful of dishes, and then slip into bed next to Rudi.

What are you planning for this weekend?

It’s still supposed to be around 90, but the humidity is supposed to dip down into the sub-50% range, so I’m going to try to spend some time in the garden getting beans into the ground before it’s too late to do that for the season. Then I’m going to lounge by the pool.

I’m going to watch some of the Tour de France and maybe some of the Wimbledon finals (go, Serena!) and I’m going to knit — carefully — quite a bit. I’d like to be most of the way through the solid purple section by the end of the weekend, but that will only happen if I have to rip less than I have been doing this past week.

I finished Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors before picking up my laptop tonight. I’d need to return it and a couple other things to the library and pick up a couple holds and the first of my summer reading prizes, if they haven’t already given it away.

I need to find my car’s title this week, which means actually doing the hard work of looking through the papers in our apartment, rather than just saying I’m going to. The insurance will need to be renewed two weeks from today and while I can let it sit where it is without insurance, I’d rather not in case I need to move it. Plus, I’d like to drive it locally one or two more times before I have to give it away and I absolutely cannot do that if I don’t have the title, because what if it dies someplace absolutely inconvenient? Three cylinders means my car and I cannot take one more three-hour drive to the beach, but probably does mean we can take a three-mile drive for Connecticut-style pizza, although obviously my poor old car will have the final say about that. Honestly, I’m crying writing about that, so let’s move on.

Sunday is Bastille Day, so I will either decide we’re going to have crepes or raclette for supper or take myself out for la glace from one of the French restaurant ice cream carts during the afternoon. Maybe both. Or maybe neither and my celebration will only go as far as colored sugar on my chocolat chaud.

Once again, I’m behind in my job applying, so some of that needs to happen tomorrow morning. And I have to do some chores, because Laundry Mountain is threatening to avalanche onto our bed while we sleep and because I no longer need to block Corey from getting to the living room window. And I need to go to the farmers market because our compost bin is full and I do not have enough berries in my life and maybe to the bagel shop because fresh bagels are really nice on a weekend.

Anyway, none of that can happen if I don’t go to sleep. Have a great weekend, whatever you choose to do with it!

It’s already a third of the way through the second month of summer, which means next week is roughly the midway point of the meteorological (as opposed to astronomical) season. I might not be failing at summer, but I’m definitely flailing a bit, which is probably indicative of where my head is these days.

Rudi and I fixed our air conditioner, which is great, because comfortable sleeping. But pleasant daytime temperatures in the apartment during our recent heat wave have made me a little loathe to leave it, sometimes even on the nicer days, and that’s not good for me. So I thought I’d brainstorm a little about things that I haven’t done this summer yet that I’d like to.

Here are then things that still seem totally reasonable to do this summer:

1. Go to the beach. I miss the ocean desperately.
2. Go home. I have spent the least amount of time ever in my life with my family and friends back home this year. Not being here in the event of a job interview has stressed me out tremendously, but it’s not like I couldn’t just come back early, right?
3. Watch an outdoor movie.
4. Attend an outdoor concert. We were going to go to Fort Reno last night, but the four inches of water D.C. received yesterday morning made the prospect very muddy.
5. Check out the suffrage exhibitions around town. The National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Portrait Gallery all have have shows on right now about the centennial anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment.
6. Picnic. I mean, how hard is it to pack a supper to eat outside?
7. Attend a Tour de France watching party. The danger of going to parties in Rudi’s social circle is that Rudi knows everyone and it’s impossible to extricate him without him having conversations with every bloody person in the room. If I just for a little while and plan to leave without him, I’m hoping I’ll find that less frustrating.
8. Claim my first summer reading prizes. Reading is the only thing I’m reasonably successful at right now, so I have prizes waiting for me in Virginia and at my local D.C. branch.
9. Try Jamaican and Filipino flavors of ice cream at regional shops.
10. Attend the National Book Festival, which is on the final day of August.

Stretch goal: Adopt a new member of the family. Since Jeremiah died, we’ve been a one-cat family. Corey has a lot of personality and we aren’t fully sure about how adding a new cat to the mix will go, but he has lived with up to three other cats in our apartment without too much fur flying, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. We’d like to have a second cat again, so we’re hoping when the Humane Rescue Alliance has their next clear-the-shelter event (or, you know, we attend our next wedding), we’ll be able to take advantage of it.

What do you hope the rest of your summer includes?

Whoops! This didn’t post last night. Anyway…

As we were walking home from the pool and the garden this afternoon, we noticed the storm clouds overtaking the sun in a dramatic fashion. This is taken from Massachusetts looking west over Embassy Row.

Within 20 minutes, the winds were approaching gale force and sheets of water were pouring from the sky, obscuring the buildings across the road from us, with loud cracks of thunder overhead. It was a delightful time to be inside, and I truly appreciated our cozy Burrow.