Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. At Tuesday’s knitting group, I finally got around to that sock I started knitting a year ago before I got distracted by knitting things for other people. I had made a notation of where I had left off, but I knew that before I could begin I needed to replace one of the needles (because it was cracked and sock yarn is too thin to be forgiving of snags) and to move the stitches I had accidentally placed on the wrong needle. After I did both those things (and then did them again when I realized that I had moved the stitches over backwards, making it impossible to keep knitting), I couldn’t remember exactly how to knit using two circular needles. But then I remembered. And that felt so good.

2. This morning during the walk to the Metro, I was brought to a metaphysical standstill by the smell of earth. For those of you from warm climes, the smell of earth probably means little. But to me, coming from the cold Northeast originally, the smell of earth in mid-January offers the promise that spring will eventually arrive. Of course, a rainstorm followed by a sunny day in the sixties doesn’t hurt as a reminder, either.

3. Every review I read of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was great, so I bought a copy to read on a business trip a few years back. It was okay, but definitely not worth the accolades — its only real claim to originality was to set the plot in Africa and to feature an African woman as the sleuth. Just didn’t do it for me. But this week, when I went to the library, I saw a book from another of his series sitting amidst the new releases. This is why libraries exist after all — to pick up a book by an author that you might not like and don’t want to spend money on. I rationalized that while I liked M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth books, I’m not all that crazy about her Agatha Raisin series, and this could be a similar situation. I’m about halfway through The Sunday Philosophy Club, the first book in Smith’s second series, and am finding that I’m enjoying it much more than than the other.