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?

This weekend was pleasant, but oh, so short!

On Friday after work, we celebrated the sun by taking our books and beverages up to the park. This park is one of my favorite things about my neighborhood, and I ended up there on Saturday, too, when it was a bit less fair out. But there’s a little caretaker cottage that gets used during the summertime with a generous overhang, so as you can see I didn’t let a little rain stop me.

I’m really pleased with the camera on my new phone and I took a bunch of photos on my walk home”

Saturday also included a visit to a couple embassies for EU Day, when members of the European Union open their D.C. embassies to the public for a few hours. I visited Cypress briefly, where things were winding down, but then moved on to Slovenia, which was far more lively.

In the evening, we had a party for Rudi at our local board game bar. We ate and drank, had cupcakes, and played Trvial Pursuit and Jenga, both of which Rudi won, which seemed only appropriate.

Yesterday, I went to the farmers market and spent three plus hours in the garden. You can see that the violets and the sorrel had been loving the rain:

I yanked violet leaves (although left most of the roots), because they share the plot with my strawberries and had far eclipsed them in height. Now that sun was in the forecast, they needed to be able to start turning red! I also got 20 plants in the ground, most of which were acquired last weekend at Sheep & Wool. It took a while, but I hope this will be my last long day in the garden for a while.

This morning I was up early to get breakfast for Rudi, since it’s his birthday. After work, we’re going out to dinner at a new-to-us restaurant (a Christmas present from my brother).

How was your weekend?

This weekend included Friday pizza dinner with a friend and a trip for the three of us to opening day of the new Captain America: Civil War. (I’m #TeamBlackWidow, if it matters.)

On Saturday, I slept in and got some chores done. I missed out on visiting the Bahamanian embassy as part of Passport DC, but did get to my local comic book shop, Fantom, for Free Comic Book Day. I also visited the French bakery that opened where the cupcake shop used to be. They make desserts based around meringues. I started reading a new graphic novel, planted some things at the garden, and bought a case for my new cell phone. I did not write a book blog post about my April reading because I had to finish a post for work about bee swarms, and it took longer than I expected. (The book post will come later this week.)

Today, Rudi and I went to the farmers market and to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. We saw sheep and sheepdogs and ate funnel cake. I bought a skein of yarn to make Rudi a hat. He bought spices to make me dinners. We bought tomato, pepper, and basil plants to make our garden productive.

And now a look ahead, rather than backward: This week is both Armchair BEA, the book blogger version of the Book Expo of America convention, and Bout of Books 16, a weeklong readathon/reading challenge. I’ll be participating in both and blogging about them here and invite you to take part, too. I’m hoping to finish three books by the end of the week, blog at least thrice on bookish topics, and take part in at least two off-blog events (be they contests or Twitter chats or something else remains to be seen).

As promised, yesterday’s moonrise from Savin Rock in West Haven, Connecticut:

This week’s Ten on Tuesday topic from Carole asks us to write about Ten Things I Like to Do Outdoors:

1. Be at the beach. I like to swim in the summer. I like to wade in the spring and fall. I like to walk briskly in the winter. I like to look for shells. I like to watch dolphins swim past. I like to read. I like to picnic. I like to nap. Pretty much everything else I like doing in life is better when done outdoors at the beach.
2. Ride my bike. Rudi and I do not agree on a ton of things about cycling, but we both concur that there is very little point in doing it indoors. It’s also a surprisingly nice way to see a city at the ground level while covering more ground, if you have that option. I’m lucky that I quickly overcame my concerns about biking in traffic, which even some of Rudi’s suburban cycley friends don’t like to do. We also have some very nice bike trails around and just outside the city if you are leery about spending a lot of time in the same space as cars. Oh, and, it makes you very virtuous if you bike to an ice cream shop and then bike home after consuming a cone.
3. Listen to music. Concerts are great at any time of the year in any setting, but they’re especially nice outside. We are partial to the free Friday night concerts at Yards Park, which finds us across town to mark the start of nearly every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
4. Swim. This partially goes along with #1, but it also applies to lakes, ponds, and pools. I somehow never bring myself to get to the indoor pools here in D.C., but I’m at the outdoor pool by my garden every weekend it’s open, if only for half an hour.
5. Garden. I have indoor plants that live on my windowsill at work, but they are of the ornamental variety. Don’t get me wrong, plant gods, I love when those plants thrive and flower. But there’s something about the plants I grow in my community garden plot that seem especially … real, I guess, and connected to the cycle of living things.
6. Watch baseball games. I grew up listening to baseball on the radio, so I’m really perfectly content with a play-by-play announcer and color commentator and nothing else. However, since moving to a city that now has a team and joining a season ticket group, I’ve grown to see the appeal of early spring and late September games in a stadium. There is a magical moment when the sun gets low in the sky and you start to notice the park lights (unless it’s an overlong day game, they turn them on ahead of time, although that’s always a great scene in baseball movies).
7. Shop. I am lucky in that in our city there are farmers markets practically every day during the spring, summer, and fall, and that I live in the neighborhood with one of the two year-round markets, so I do a lot of my grocery buying there. We also have flea-type markets where you can buy greeting cards, maker markets where you can shop for funky gifts, and Christmas markets where you can stock up for the holidays.
8. Walk. It drives my more suburban friends a little nuts when they come to town and I assure them the fastest way to get down to and around the Mall, museums, and monuments is not, in fact, to take the Metro, but is to walk the two miles down there, walk around, and then walk back. Plus, during tourist season, it’s probably the best way to avoid wanting to stab people who stand on the wrong side of the escalator and then stop one step off of the top of it to pull out their phones and acclimate themselves.
9. Watch movies. Outdoor films have become a big thing during the summer season. Once upon a time, we had to rely on the Screen on the Green to allow us to watch movies al fresco. Now, inflatable screen rentals have become so cheap that you can literally go to the movies outside every night in July and August if you are so inclined. Some film series have themes (office movies, superheroes, presidential flicks), and they range in age from the 1930s to winter releases. There’s something literally for everyone.
10. Drink hot beverages, have a snack, read, and knit. Now, yes, I see how you could make those four separate things, but they aren’t, really. I like to do all those things together, whether it’s outside a cafe or in a park, and whether it’s comestibles I’ve picked up out and about or something I’ve packed from home.

How about you? What do you like to do outside?