Our weekend actually turned out pretty nice. Saturday, I caught up on sleep for the first half of the day. We spent five hours at our local watering hole with friends belatedly celebrating Rudi’s birthday and generally soaking up what turned out to be an ideal June evening. Oh, and I mostly finished my sock, too!

This morning I went to the farmers market and came home with strawberries and sweet cherries, among other things. I suspect there had been corn earlier in the morning, but I’m okay waiting until another day for that. I am hopeful for blueberries and raspberries sometime soon, though.

I spent a lot of time at the garden. All my plants (but not the beans) are in the ground. I harvested peas, herbs (you can see the basil on our supper capreses), strawberries, salad greens, my first cherry tomato of the season, and Swiss chard out of the main beds. Then, as I was planting the shallots in the potato patch, I discovered I had grown potatoes of actual size! I put them in around April 10, so we’re just around two months for a round trip from my kitchen and back! I’ve never done a midsummer harvest of potatoes, even though I know now is when I start finding new potatoes at the market. Some of them were tiny (once I’d severed their roots, there was really no going back), but some of them are of a saleable size! That’s about half a pint there — enough for a side dish!

I also got in a swim. I’m going to go do the dishes, take a shower, and then hit the hay. This week holds a baseball game, a movie, and a volleyball game if the weather finally cooperates again — and then maybe a trip to the beach on Saturday. I’m looking forward to it all.

It’s been a crummy workweek, with one coworker leaving and the news that my boss is being switched into a new position a week after she gets back from vacation, and somehow deadlines don’t ever get crossed off. Volleyball was canceled due to rain. It was ridiculously hot and then ridiculously rainy, and I spent way too much time sitting in my apartment. I worked my butt off to clear enough stuff to be able to keep my laptop closed this weekend (and mostly my remaining colleagues are interested in keeping me sane) and this is how I’m going to spend my time:

• Spend several hours in the garden. I have some more planting to do. There are peas and greens to be picked. I want to get beans and the last of the plants I picked up in Connecticut into the ground.
• Go to the farmers market. We’re getting close to the end of strawberry season, but that means cherries, blueberries, and raspberries are on their way in.
• Swim. While I did bike down to meet my coworker to take her to a goodbye lunch, my only other activity has been swimming. The outdoor pool is only open on weekends for the next few weeks, so I need to get myself moving a little earlier.
• Knit outside. Tomorrow is Worldwide Knit in Public Day. I have no qualms about knitting pretty much anyplace, but I think my rainbow sock will be super popular in Dupont on Pride Weekend.
• Pick up holds at two libraries. I didn’t get to either library last weekend, so now I need to get to both this weekend. (One is in Virginia, so it’s less convenient than it might otherwise be.)
• Buy books. It’s the quarterly member sale at one of my local bookshops.
• Have a belated birthday happy hour for Rudi at our local watering hole. (It’s also a fancy grocery store and has some tasty food options they make in-house, including a surprisingly good grilled cheese. We also have a gift card from last spring that expires next week, so that’s a nice bonus.)
• Do laundry. How do I have no clean tshirts?
• Paint my nails. I keep only thinking of it right before bed.
• Sleep.

How about you? What are you hoping to get to this weekend? (And lest you worry overmuch about my working too hard, next week I have fun evening activities on three days and maybe plans to go to the beach on Saturday.)

By and large, it was a quiet weekend. I didn’t feel great on Saturday, so I napped in the afternoon, messing up my plans for a productive day. But I felt much better when I got back up in the evening, and Rudi and I took a trip down to the garden to harvest some things that we ended up not eating, followed by a trip to Trader Joe’s to pick up some more things that we ended up not eating. We did eat some things already living in our fridge, though, thereby making room for our new acquisitions. We watched Rudi’s Red Sox beat the Yankees, and then I watched the Mets beat the Padres. I knit and then listened to my audiobook.

This morning I sallied forth to the farmers market. I bought a lot of strawberries and the first zucchini and green beans of the season, as well as a variety of other odds and ends.

I spent the later part of the afternoon at the pool for my first real swim since August 2019. (I’ve been to beaches since then, but either temperatures or rip tides made me decline to do more than dunk myself and then run back to my towel.) It was glorious. I swear the pool was Bahamian blue (or at least what it looks like on tv) and the trees practically glowed green, but that may just have been my joy at some sense of summer normalcy.

I pulled some spring greens out (all the arugula and some of the spinach) and yanked more violet leaves and bunching onions in an effort to find places for all my new plants. A few remain to be planted, which will force me to leave work at a reasonable enough time to spend an hour at the garden early this week. And then Rudi and I watched the Kennedy Center Honors before he retired and I raced the clock to finish my audiobook. (Downloading to your phone is very convenient, until you’re at the last day with more chapters remaining than you’d like before it stops being playable.)

The week ahead holds our baseball seat lottery for the rest of the season, hopefully my volleyball championship, and possibly a belated birthday outing for Rudi.

I hope you have a great start to the week!

I got a head’s up tonight that more changes are coming at work. This will mark the fifth major shift in as many months that touches either my department or the organization, and I admit that I’m struggling to keep my head above water. Each time I think I’ve processed and adapted to a change, a new one comes along that threatens my newly adjusted footing, and this latest wave is the biggest one yet.

In the long run, I will be fine. My department will be fine. The organization will be fine.

But in the short term, I’m scrambling and feeling unsettled and just wishing for some solid ground beneath my feet.

My parents live a bit off the beaten track, not so far that someone wouldn’t hear you if you called for help, but not so close they’d immediately be able to tell where you were.

It’s relatively quiet here, especially at night, but mostly quiet as defined in country terms. Overnight, you won’t hear traffic, although on rare nights you get a troop transfer flying overhead. I can hear peepers and crickets and other outdoorsy creatures marking time. When Rudi and I came upstairs to bed, we could listened to a very chatty owl. Sometimes you hear a second one, but if there was one tonight, I think they were both in the woods out back. Last night when I woke up in the middle of the night I heard a fox or a fisher cat screaming. It was very disconcerting, even if I did know it wasn’t a human making those noises. (See above.)

At home, I get cars passing by at all hours, although overnight, there are fewer of them. The birds start calling around 2 a.m. and stay chatty until dawn. You don’t hear the cicadas in my neighborhood, but you do in some others. Rats periodically scrabble past.

These aren’t the sounds I grew up with mostly (my suburban neighborhood was far closer to what I get here), but they’re what I’ve become used to.

I got something like 12 hours of sleep last night, and I didn’t need to take a nap during the day. Amazing!