Portions of the next few weekends will be spent on the road, which means I need to make this last one at home count.

I’ll spend tomorrow morning at the garden doing some work on the communal spaces (and hopefully tending a bit to my own plot, which I’ve neglected of late). I need to make a trip to Georgetown to pick up a library hold and need to procure more quarters.

There are several festivals I’d like to take advantage of. Tomorrow afternoon is the the Barracks Row festival and tomorrow night is Art All Night, which runs until 3 a.m., although probably I won’t stay out the whole time (although maybe I will, because I like to encourage people to plan activities during my favorite hours, rather than in the morning). Sunday includes an arts center’s anniversary block party on the other side of town and the Turkish and Latinx festivals closer to home.

In between, I’d like to do some cooking, cleaning and laundry, hang some art on the walls, paint my nails, and hit the farmers market. I’m tired just thinking about it all, so I guess I’d better get in some sleep, too!

This is the Unisphere at Corona Park in New York City, erected in 1964 for the World’s Fair. This photo does not do it justice for just how big and impressive the statue is.

Friday night we had concert tickets to see Paul Simon perform here in D.C. (Yes, we saw him in Boston at the start of the summer. And we’ll see him again in New York City next weekend for the final tour performance of his career. Rudi is a big fan, and the D.C. dates weren’t announced originally, or we might not have travelled north.) He didn’t vary the songs at all, although the stories were different. He started off stronger this time, but he looked more tired. You believed him, when he sang, “I’m just trying to get some rest.”

On Saturday, I ran some errands and visited the garden, where I yanked out some plants that had grown to monster size and picked some tomatoes, beans, ground cherries, and peppers. I have peppers in a couple places in the garden, but thought one of the two plants in the back of the garden (near where the yellow jackets live) had died. Turns out, it was growing bell peppers (or something similar; less mature fruits were white) all summer long, and I had this lovely specimen to bring home, in addition to the two other types of peppers (one’s a sweet frying pepper and the other might be a poblano) that have matured.

Today included a trip to the farmers market, some time reading, more errands and laundry, and the final day of the last grand tour race of the cycling season on tv.

Honestly, the weekend felt a bit off, or maybe the weekend felt fine and I felt off. But either way, it was disappointing, which feels weird and ungrateful to say about several days that did not include dangerous weather conditions or water seeping into my apartment, particularly when so many others were not so fortunate.

The week ahead is a busy one, with my last free evening just having been filled with an anti-Kavanaugh protest. Please don’t forget to contact your senators, particularly with this week’s revelations. We have more power than we think, but we have to wield it. (Since I lack senators, you get to hear me ask again and again for you to avail yourselves of yours on my behalf. Even senators we think are solidly on the correct side of things should be dropped an email or phone call/voice mail, since they don’t know you think this is important if you don’t tell them, and they might be swung by those they do hear from. This is a lifetime appointment, and we’ll have the rest of ours to rue this if we don’t do enough.)

I was sitting at the coffeehouse this evening, fully engrossed in my book, when the mosquitoes started making their presence known. Eventually I decided, mid-chapter or no, that being able to see the swarm’s shadow reflected down on my page meant I should go home.

I got up and started to gather my things together and was immediately greeted by this sight:

A sunset so absolutely glorious that I immediately exclaimed it so out loud.

And I totally would have missed it had it not been for the mosquitoes. I’ve never been grateful to them before, but I completely am tonight.

A few things I’d like to do this weekend, since it no longer centers around a hurricane:

• Finish some books and maybe a knitting project. (I have 20 minutes left on one audiobook and two chapters on another, so it seems likely.)
• Go to the library.
• Watch a film. (The Princess Bride is the midnight show at one of the nearby movie theaters. Or maybe just a dvd.)
• Paint my nails.
• Send my Ninja Bookswap package.
• Get to a couple cooking projects.
• Do laundry.
• Visit a bookstore.
• Head to a neighborhood festival. (The big one planned for this weekend was canceled early in the week due to the expected storm, but a couple of the smaller ones are still on.)
• Email Sarah to plan our annual apple picking trip.
• Spend time outside.
• Work in the garden. (Tomatoes and beans need harvesting and I should probably pull the last of the basil. And I should get some seeds in the ground for fall greens.)

How about you? What are you hoping your weekend includes? (If it includes riding out the hurricane, you’re in my thoughts.)

Our weekend was jam-packed and packed with jam.

Our Friday evening plans got rained out, and then our rain contingency plans got thrown out when the 2.5″ of rain that came down in an hour seeped into our apartment.

Flood protocols in place, Rudi headed off to work on Saturday, and (several hours later) I headed out on some errands. In the afternoon, I went up to the Petworth neighborhood where they were having a street festival. I bought some handmade cards, refrained from buying handmade jewelry, and ate Indian food from a local restaurant. I found their local hardware store and bought lightbulbs for the track lighting by our door that had gone out and returned home to replace them and put on warmer clothing, before heading to the ballpark.

Jayson Werth, who retired earlier this year, was being honored by the Nationals, with a funny and poignant ceremony in which he razzed his teammates and his teammates presented him with a rocking chair for his old age. He teared up (and then the entire ballpark followed suit) telling his mom, who was there with him and to whom he credited his athletic work ethic, that he’d left it all on the field. He then threw out the ceremonial first pitch, but because they’d placed the podium on the front of the pitcher’s mound, it’s clear that they planned on his throwing from in front of it. He was having none of that, though, and just threw his strike (in to his teenage son crouched down at the plate) over the podium instead. While it was long obvious to locals that he was a favorite with the fans (endearing himself early on when one of his batting songs was the theme to Game of Thrones), it was clear that everyone who worked at the ballpark liked him, too, and you could see him throughout the game popping up in various sections for selfies and to chat with employees.

This morning, we slept in before ambling over to the farmers market, where we bought a ginormous bag of yellow Romas, which Rudi later turned half of into soup. We watched some cycling and then braved the rain to go to the 40th anniversary Adams Morgan Festival. We listened to some live music, supported some school kids, signed a petition to get the alcohol permit revoked from the Trump hotel, and ate Nepalese momo dumplings. We sampled three homemade jams — strawberry habanero lime, orange vanilla lavender, and blueberry basil lemon — and liked them so much we bought all three. (You’ve been wondering since that first paragraph, haven’t you?) We wrapped up the day with a trip to one of D.C.’s indie bookstores, where they were having their quarterly member sale. We each came home with things we’d been looking for, including the new cds from Paul McCartney and Paul Simon and a collection of poetry, so it was a good way to conclude the weekend.

The week ahead holds a lot of rain (including potentially a hurricane), but today our landlord dropped off some sandbags, some sandless sandbags, and some more towels to help us cope. And we have a lot of fun activities planned, too, including meals with friends, volleyball games, and a concert. I hope you have things to look forward to, as well.