Sickness has a way of making you appreciate the small things in life, because you’re just incapable of achieving big things. So in that frame of mind, I offer several beautiful things from my sick days:

1. All I wanted yesterday was a popsicle. Really. My throat hurt so much, I was miserable. Needing tp for the apartment and not wanting to trek all the way up to Rite Aid, I stopped at CVS when I got off the Metro. Not only did they have tp, as well as nice soft applesauce and mandarin oranges, but they also sold Edy’s fruit bars. I don’t think I’ve tasted anything so nice as that sweet stream of strawberriness as it melted down my throat (and my arm) on the walk home.

2. Rudi attended a fundraiser last night and stopped home to bring me a bunch of balloons before going out with some friends for a late dinner. They were a very sweet gesture, rustling over my head and freaking Jeremiah out with their pinging against one another. (I’m pretty sure he vaulted through the window in our bedroom in a single bound. I admit it; I laughed.) They were even funnier around 4:30 this morning, when they deflated a little, floated out of the bedroom, and caught their ribbons in the clamp that holds the fan’s screen on (not actually in the fan’s blades). There they were doing balloon boxing when I awoke. Della was looking on from the cat perch with utter delight. You could just hear her thinking, “More! More!”

3. I went to work on Tuesday because, as I have noted, I have an encroaching deadline that has me remarkably stressed out (and because I thought the flu was waning. If I’d known that it was strep and that it just a breather before the major bout, I might have handled things differently). Nonetheless, there I was on Tuesday, so I went up to our weekly lunchtime knitting group. I had knit a bit on the sock over the weekend — enough to know that I need to pull it out (again!) and knit it on smaller needles. (It does occur to me that I should perhaps let these socks rest for a little while and try a different pair…) So I decided to knit a gauge swatch for the baby sweater from the yarn I bought on Saturday. (For those who don’t knit, you knit a gauge swatch — a little 4″x4″ square — to avoid problems like I had with the sock where you find out that you and the person who wrote the pattern differ so dramatically in your choice of yarn or how tightly you knit that you end up with a different sized garment from what you’re expecting. This is not a problem in a scarf or a bag. It is a much bigger problem in something like a sweater and something you really ought to do if you’re giving said sweater as a gift to a friend.) And I’m on gauge! So I don’t need to mess with different sized needles and can cast on for the sweater as soon as I’m feeling a little more lively. (Don’t want to give any strep germs as a bonus baby gift…)

Three bonus beautiful things:

4. Moms: My own is a wonderful caretaker and is sending me emails several times a day to check on my recovery. There’s no one I’ve ever wanted around more when I was sick, and I’m grateful for the virtual nursing. Rudi’s mom is a doctor and is supervising my recovery from 2,500 miles away. And my boss’s motherly instincts kicked in yesterday to send me home as soon as she saw me. Even if I couldn’t see that it wasn’t essential for me to be in the office for things to get done, she could see that I needed some additional recovery time.

5. Increments: I am feeling better today. Not well, but well enough to work from home. I expect to feel even better tomorrow. And the day after that. The miracles of penicillin…

6. You: Thank you for all the well wishes. I don’t even know some of you! All suggestions were taken, and it gave me a little boost each time I got up and someone else had left a note. I’m sure today’s progress is, in part, due to all of you.

Rudi and I decided to mosey out into the heat today for a local neighborhood’s Dog Days of Summer sale.

We explored a few shops along U Street we hadn’t been in before and stopped at Love Café for discounted cupcakes (Rudi opted for hazlenut frosting on a chocolate cupcake, while I went for the adventurous lime frosting on vanilla).

We turned down 14th Street to explore more parts of the sale. Rudi found a record shop hidden under some stairs. I visited a new vet that was just opening up and brought home some food samples and cat treats.

We next stopped at the local gardening shop, where we bought some saucers to go under a couple pots we had as well as a larger pot for our tomatoes to go into.

Finally, we ended up at a pet store (the kind that sells stuff for your pet as opposed to the kind that sells pets), where we picked up some new toys for the cats — soft balls for Della (who doesn’t appreciate them as much in the Burrow as she did in Connecticut where she liked to chase them down the stairs before bringing them back up to you to throw again), some nubby bouncy balls, and some plastic springs.

The toys were met with delight by the cats. But after Rudi left to go do some shopping and my back was turned at the computer, Della descended from the top of the dresser, went digging in my bag, and surfaced with the cat treats. Apparently she felt that I was holding out on the good stuff!

What could I do in the face of such undaunted ingenuity? I promptly parceled out the whole bag of treats amongst the three cats, who then tottered off to their own preferred spots to sleep off a delicious snack.

Three beautiful things from our time on the road last week:

1. I took knitting on vacation with me. (This is not surprising; I take knitting everywhere, almost.) I packed Rudi’s sock, which I didn’t work on much because damp or sweaty hands do not encourage the easy flow of narrow-guage yarn, and I packed some cotton my friend Cynthia had sent me to make dishcloths with. Dasch and Reesie watched me knit for a while, and then Reesie asked if she could try. “Sure,” I said. “You work the yarn and I’ll hold the needles.” And sure enough we knit a whole row together like that. Then Dasch asked if he could try. And he did, but then he got bored and wanted us to switch and for him to work the needles and me to work the yarn. “Okay.” I showed him how and off we went. But then there were marshmallows to roast and s’mores to make and yarn was abandoned for loftier pursuits (by me as well as them). Next year, though, I’m breaking the yarn and needles out early.

2. There is nothing like having little kids sidle up to you and want to sit on your lap or snuggle with you on a blanket. Dasch, Reesie, and their new friend Aveeva all wanted some lap time over the weekend. And a couple of times I ended up on the blanket late at night with a sleepy child dozing off in my lap. There’s no nicer feeling in the whole wide world.

3. We arrived at Turkey Ridge after the folk festival ended to discover two new residents had moved into the family homestead. Callie and Chloe are two pint-sized, nine-week-old fluff balls. They’re a little skittish around people yet, as they’ve only been part of the family for a week. They run and jump and play nonstop until they crawl under something to sleep for 10 hours, causing mild alarm and panic about where they’ve disappeared to. They’re still at that age when their purrers are more developed than their tiny, palm-sized selves and when they consent to sit with you for a few minutes, their motors run full-speed.

Today is a vacation day for many (although not for Rudi nor me). In that spirit, I offer you three beautiful things from my life:

Della thinks you might have forgotten her after looking at the kittens (who, at four, should rightly no longer be called kittens). She asks that you end with her.

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. One of the houses that adjoins the back of ours has a cat they let out into the backyard periodically. The cat enjoys coming over and peering in our bedroom window. Jeremiah and Della took affront at this when it first started happening, but Della has grown bored with the whole thing. Jeremiah still likes to defend our honor, but in a non-bushy kind of way. He stands on the inside window sill, Neighbor Cat stands on the outside window sill, and they box back and forth as if they could actually reach one another. Jer looks just like he does when he’s rassling with Posey in real time. I think he won this morning’s bout because he looked very proud of himself when he eventually abandoned his post by the window.

2. Pericles was an enjoyable romp in the woods Saturday night. It was obvious that the National Shakespeare Theatre enjoyed putting it on, particularly when you saw a pirate character emerge dressed like Captain Hook from Peter Pan.

3. When I was out on the C&O Canal path this weekend, I kept my eyes open for ducklings because I hadn’t seen any yet this season. I did eventually see some on the way home — two little yellow fellows swimming by themselves as well as a wood duck family with three tiny babies (about the size of a Peep, but not as easily melted). I also saw some Canada Geese families, or maybe daycare centers. One pair had 14 young’uns; the other had 17! They were all swimming in lines, just like you see little kids in on field trips. They were utterly adorable.

Bonus beautiful thing: Our favorite Ben’s Chili Bowl counter man, David, was back at work when we stopped in last night. We hadn’t seen him in months and were afraid that he’d left Ben’s without saying good-bye. But instead he’d just gone home for 2 1/2 months for a visit, so it was good news all around.

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. Karen took me bra shopping on Friday (this how good a friend she is; she didn’t force me to stand under fluorescent lights in my underwear by myself). I came home with three new pieces of support garmenture, two of which even have little ribbon roses on them, which will stay as long as they don’t show through my t-shirts. It’s okay if I know they are there, but I’m not particularly interested in having strangers on the street notice them.

2. I admit it: I like words. I know an awful lot of them and enjoy using them. I enjoyed Spell Bound and Akeelah and the Bee a great deal. If I could only take one book with me to a desert island, it would be a (good) dictionary. So tonight it was with great anticipation that I turned on ABC to watch this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee. I was blown away. These are elementary- and middle-school children spelling multi-syllabic words that I’ve never heard of — and spelling them right, often, to boot. So I have to admit that even though I was competing against children twenty years my junior, it was with great pride that I knew two of the words of the final 25: koine and weltschmerz. Koine refers to a local dialect that becomes the main language of a larger area. (It is also the name of our Conn yearbook.) And weltschmerz literally translates to “world pain,” referring to a profound sadness about the shape the world is in.

3. There are five kittens living at the house at the opposite end of the block. Rudi had seen them the other day and when we went out for cone (mmmm…. cone!) last night, we spent some time playing with them from the other side of the fence. And tonight I got a chance to see two of them nursing, lying practically on top of each other. There are three little gray tiger kittens (who look like their mother) and two black ones, including an imp who was using a low-lying shrub branch as a trampoline.