Rudi is off for the next four days and I have no real plans except to take advantage of his not being here to put the apartment to rights. It’s not that his being here prevents that; it’s just that when he’s here, I’d rather spend time with him than waste time on putting away the Christmas stuff or finding the coffee table.

I’m going to head to the library to return things that have holds on them, but not before I make one more try to get the rest of the way through Isle of Dogs. I just don’t really like Wes Anderson films, even when they’re animated. And that will get me outside and into the sunshine.

I made some cookie dough today, so there will also be another batch of chocolate chip cookies to bake and eat.

And I’ll probably see if one of my local friends wants to hang out at some point.

I probably won’t watch the Super Bowl. I don’t care about football, the political bent of some of the Patriots have made them hard for this New Englander to root for, and the commercials aren’t really enough reason to sit through the rest of it. They’ll be on YouTube.

And I’m going to read and knit. Just maybe not until after I put away the Christmas ornaments.

As you can probably see, I didn’t write either longer blog post I hoped to finish, but that doesn’t mean I accomplished nothing on this mild winter weekend.

I saw the sunrise on Saturday when I went to buy bagels. Corey and I then went back to bed, which is the only reasonable reaction to seeing the sun rise.

I went to Georgetown to the library, where I used their printer and picked up my hold and checked out the progress of the bulbs on Book Hill.

I then moseyed down to Baked & Wired for a cup of hot chocolate. The key during busy times is to forego cupcakes and other major sweets in favor of drinks (and, if you want, quick breads), because there’s rarely a line for the latter but almost always a line for the former on nice days.

Rudi and I made homemade pizza before he had to turn in for the night.

Today, I visited the farmers market for some vegetables and worked on getting my ukulele in tune. (I think I need new strings, because these are ancient and do not want to remain taut. Luckily, there’s a music shop a couple metro stops away, so there’s a task for later in the week.) Late in the afternoon, I headed to a local coffeehouse where I sat out on their patio for a while, listening to my audiobook and working on my sock. As I was walking home, I spotted some forsythia, a mid-winter staple in the area. (It was in focus in real life.)

Rudi and I concluded the weekend by watching the live-ish performance of Rent on tv — quite enjoyable.

I hope you also had a nice final January weekend!

This is the final weekend of January. Here’s how I’m thinking I’ll spend it:

• Spend time with Rudi. I think this the last weekend he’s around for a while with the ski race season peaking in February and all-weekend coaching duties calling, so that tops on my list. However, he’ll be gone during the day both days, so I also hope to…
• Hang up fairy lights around the perimeter of the room. We didn’t get them up before our December party, and then there was a tree preventing us from getting them all the way around the room. Since it’s now sitting on the curb awaiting composting and since we have many more months of darkness ahead (although way less each day than a month ago), I think this is an appropriate way to welcome February.
• Wash laundry. Now that I no longer have a tree taking up so much of my living room, we can once again use our larger laundry rack in its usual spot, rather than having to do the drying on the small rack in the bathtub (which we are grateful was an option).
• Buy bread. The bakery we like so much at the summer downtown farmers market will be doing a pop-up tomorrow just a mile away. I just need to get there before 12:30.
• Go to Georgetown. To the library in particular, since I have a hold that came in there that I forgot about that expires on Sunday.
• Eat pizza. There’s no real reason for this except pizza.
• Cuddle Corey. Both he and I need more snuggles right now.
• Play my ukulele. (That was the only thing from last weekend’s to-do list I didn’t get to.)
• Finish a book. I have several of the Cybils finalists out right now and would love to be able to have finished a whole category before the winners are announced on Valentine’s Day. I’d also like to get partway caught up with Middlemarch, which the library in the next town over is doing a group read of.
• Write a couple of longer blog posts, including the one where I figure out the best books I read last year.
• Enjoy the outside. There’s a rain storm and a cold day or two due mid-week, so I’d rather take advantage of nicer weather to be outdoors.

How about you? What are you hoping to do this weekend?

Things I’d like to do this weekend:

• Attend the Women’s March.
• Go to a birthday party.
• Dedecorate my Christmas tree.
• Deal with the anticipated flooding.
• Shop at the farmers market.
• Read.
• Do laundry. Woolens, in particular, top the list.
• Start a new pair of socks.
• Put flannel sheets on the bed.
• Play my ukulele.
• Watch a movie. Maybe My Man Godfrey, if I can figure out where my copy is hiding…
• Snuggle with Jeremiah, who is ailing, and Corey.

How about you? If you won’t be spending your entire weekend shifting snow, what do you hope to accomplish?

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I went shopping for slippers.

Nearly nine years ago, Rudi visited Austria and Germany with his mom to see family friends and visit the town in which she spent her adolescence. One of those friends owns a lederhosen shop that also sells other clothing, including woolen slippers. Rudi and his mom each came home with a pair of felt clogs. Rudi wore them a bit, but they were warm and eventually I appropriated them. And wore them into the ground. Quite literally.

The holes in the toes appeared first, but you can ignore those. Then the holes in the heels, but, again, as long as you don’t step in liquid, mostly not a huge deal. Last winter the top of the slippers started to separate from the soles, and I started hunting for a replacement, but let’s be honest: what you find at the end of the winter at TJ Maxx is going to pale in comparison with handmade woolen slippers from the Alps.

This week, though, the thread that holds the edging around the top of the foot hole started to unravel, and I knew our time together was up. Pale or not, new slippers must be acquired.

Luckily, immediately after Christmas is an excellent time to shop for slippers at TJ Maxx, because slippers are a pretty common gift, so they bump up their supply and then immediately after the holidays discount much of what remains to get rid of it, probably to make way for bathing suits.

Anyway, I came home with two pairs that will work, each of which was marked down to $8.

Right now this blue pair is definitely my favorite of the two. They won’t last me ten years, but that’s probably okay. I had forgotten how warm it is to wear slippers without holes in them.

These red scuffs are a little smaller, but I won’t need to wear them out and about and they will get less poofy as I wear them, so I expect they’ll work just fine. However, I’ve kept them in the bag with the receipt so if I decide I don’t need two pairs I can take them back.

It was a quiet weekend at the Burrow, with Rudi out of town pursuing a snowy ski hill for his team of young racers.

There were errands and chores, but they were interspersed with time outside, trips to the library, and hours of reading.

I thought about going to a free concert, but it would have required dressing up and getting over there, and in the end pj’s, French bread pizza, and videos on the couch with the cats won out. (A Christmas Prince: A Royal Wedding got better as I watched it, in keeping with the first one; Thoroughly Modern Millie was disappointing with its unnecessary and racist Chinese-American subplot. )