This weekend of long daylight and blue skies and low humidity included:

Shakespeare in the Yard (and a Burmese dinner al fresco). The wireless mics kept shorting out, but the show was well staged and the actors did an admirable job with one of my least favorite of the Bard’s plays (The Taming of the Shrew):

A new-to-me Smithsonian — the Freer Gallery of Asian Art — seen at night as part of Solstice Saturday. One of the highlights of the gallery is Whistler’s Peacock Room:

Rudi stayed with friends in Baltimore last night after a party and returned home early this morning bearing a smoothie bowl from the farmers market. We took another lap of the market later in the morning and returned to the Burrow for a brunch of homemade blueberry pancakes.

We spent the afternoon at the garden, where weeds and bolted greens and overly enthusiastic violet leaves had taken over my plot.

It started out looking like this:

After more than two hours, we found the ground in most of the plot:

We came home with two small tomatoes, some of our last peas of the season, enough greens for supper, oregano to put up, and sorrel to turn into soup.

How was your weekend?

Happy Summer, everyone! I hope your solstice was as beautiful as ours was. We couldn’t have asked for a nicer June day!

Now that an official summer weekend has arrived, here’s what I’m hoping to do with it:

• Get some late night culture. The Smithsonians are all open until midnight on Saturday as a special once-a-year treat. Also, the By the People Festival wraps up this Sunday, and I didn’t get to any of the events last weekend…
• Watch Shakespeare in the park (or, at least, the front yard of a church). I only wish it weren’t The Taming of the Shrew, but beggars can’t be choosers and this is the only outdoor Shakespeare in the District anymore.
• Weed. So much rain=so many uninvited plants in my garden.
• Apply for some jobs.
• Make iced tea. I’ve already washed out a gallon-sized milk jug to make it in.
• Bake something with cherries. Perhaps a pie.
• Buy raspberries. I have yet to see any at farmers markets, but I have faith.
• Catch up on Endeavour. PBS doesn’t come in over the air for us (unless it’s raining), so we have to watch online and we haven’t had a chance to see the season premiere yet.
• Rip back the part of the shawl where the yarn is noticeably weird so I can finish it next week.
• Spend as much time outside as humanly possible, since the heat and humidity are lurking around the corner, ready to leap out as soon as the weekend is over.

How about you? What’s on tap for your weekend?

It’s now going on eight months since I was laid off. I had hoped to use my severance time to reflect on what seemed important moving forward and to gain some clarity about what I wanted from my next job during this forced time off. To some extent, I have — I’d like to stay with a mission-driven nonprofit, I’d like to earn a living wage with just one job (those two things often seem surprisingly at odd with one another), I’d like writing to be part of my responsibilities, and I’d love for it to focus on books or literacy in some way. In other ways, though, what I’m looking for remains as mysterious as it did in my first days of unemployment.

So far what you can say about the jobs I’ve applied for is that they are all at nonprofits and most of them involve writing in some way. (I have deviated from that only when the ability to focus on reading is an option.)

The next wave of jobs I’ve bookmarked ask you to send in a writing sample as part of the application, which has required me to revisit the material I’ve put out into the world over the past two decades. Some of it I remember quite vividly; a series of plain language health books and a couple of alumni interviews stood out. But a lot of my writing was done rather anonymously, under the general authorship of my project website. What this means is that it’s not enough to Google my name and see what comes up; I have to go back to the website and page through nearly 500 posts to see what stands out enough to be included in a writing portfolio of sorts.

It’s been illuminating. I often tell people that I don’t love writing, but I love having written. I definitely didn’t love being limited to writing about science, because that was never where my passion or my comfort levels were. It always seemed to require a lot of research to learn about something first, before I could capably explain it to my target audience of middle schoolers. But in the end, what I’m seeing and what I didn’t always appreciate in the moment, is that my job afforded me a lot of freedom to find things interesting or curious and to explore why that was and what might make someone else find it so. I’ve written about a lot of interesting things, from space to endangered species to engineering and from current scientific events and breakthroughs to famous dead people (and non-famous dead people I thought you should know more about). Mostly the prose is straightforward; I’m definitely not winning any contests for compelling posts. But most of them served their purpose — to educate — and even, on rare occasion, broke the barrier into inspiring reading.

This was all for a job that I didn’t love and that I never would have picked if a temp agency hadn’t dropped me on their doorstep.

So, if I can find things to be proud of — and that stand up years later as being worthy of reading — then I think that wherever I land next will also be fine, even if it doesn’t seem like the ideal fit at the outset. There will be things I won’t love about any job, but maybe what this shows is that there will also be things that I do.

Merriweather Post has some great sculptures and I captured two with the waxing gibbous moon:

When I’m working at the park, this is often what my kit looks like.

Obviously the laptop, which is hooked up to my cell phone hotspot to provide internet, is the most crucial item.

I bring a thermos of tea and a bottle of chilled water and a snack/lunch for sustenance. Today, it was peanut butter and graham crackers. Sometimes it’s yogurt. Other times it’s a bagel.

For protection and comfort, I have sunglasses, sunscreen, and bug spray (although I try to sit at a picnic table under the trees and they spray for mosquitoes at the park, but that doesn’t stop the no-see-ums from chewing on me).

And there’s reading material (and, inside the wicker tote, headphones and a knitting project), although none of that is guaranteed to be used. But it makes me feel better about things.

When you work outside (in your backyard, maybe, if you have one), what do you always have with you?

The coffee house with the best late evening exposure (and the nicest baristas) near us has created some beautiful planter boxes to demarcate their outdoor seating area. They’re filled with cheerful and colorful plants like petra croton and purple heart and flowering plants. Today it rained off and on, but eventually the skies cleared and Rudi and I headed over to the cafe to read away the final 90 minutes of daylight.

While there, I noticed the purple hearts were filled with water and that the water was filled with rooftops. (You’ll need to click through to Flickr and zoom in if you want to see the latter.)

I love seeing the world contained in a single drop of water.