We’re back in D.C. after three days of vacation. While in Connecticut, I:

• Ate pizza at Modern Apizza (easily the best pizzeria in the state, possibly in the country) with friends, the most recent of whom I’ve known for six years now, the oldest of whom I’ve known for half my lifetime. The gathering also included Rudi and both my ex-boyfriends.
• Bought pastries at Libby’s Pastry Shop for Easter Eve dessert. Cannolis and eclairs are almost always good dessert choices, but Libby’s takes them to another level. After 84 years, though, they ought to have it down. Plus we got to eat Italian ice. Can’t beat $1.25 for a squeeze cup of frozen sweetness…
• Had brunch with another friend who couldn’t make it the night before for pizza. She is the storyteller amongst our group of friends, and she did not disappoint. Although we had to wait forever for the waitress to bring coffee refills, that was not the real reason the meal lasted 2 1/2 hours.
• Found and bought two pairs of the sandals I loved last summer so much that I wore them to death. Note to self: treat these better so they are useful for more than one season.
• Made scones with Dad.
• Ate a delicious turkey dinner with chocolate torte for dessert prepared by Mum and Gramma for Easter. Mum packed up a ton of food for us to bring home (over my protestations), which made a tired, PMSy Monday night much more bearable. As usual, you were right, Mum.
• Birdwatched. My folks live on a great piece of property nicknamed Turkey Ridge where they attract birds of all ilk to come eat at their feeders. The turkeys are nesting for the season, so they didn’t make an appearance, but we did see gold finches, purple finches, several varieties of woodpeckers, titmouses, cardinals, blue jays, snow birds, chickadees, and others flitting around.
• Wound my 500 yards of yarn into a reasonable facsimile of a center-pull ball. Usually I just wind into a ball that rolls around while I knit, but when my ball reached the size of a softball (which is about as large as is comfortable to hold for long periods of time) and it didn’t look like I’d even started winding, I knew I’d have to come up with a revised plan. I had brought the size 17 needles that the yarn’s project is going to be knit on with me and decided I could use one of them to wind the ball around. It took two days to finish, but it is very pretty to look at. I’m somewhat loath to mess it up by starting the shawl that it will eventually become.

The weekend was not without its hitches. I didn’t spend enough time outside. We didn’t get to meet John’s fiancée because she was suffering through a nasty case of strep. Another get-together fell through at the last minute, much to my disappointment. And after an abrupt about-face at the end of Easter dinner designed to get us moving homeward in a timely fashion brought a sudden end to a relaxing family meal, I ended up in tears, which just made everyone unhappy, grumpy, or uncomfortable.

I guess it can’t all be smooth sailing, can it?

But could we have another long weekend soon?

I’m on vacation, so let’s celebrate three more beautiful things today:

1. On the drive north last night, the full moon rose orange and magnificent. It looked like an orange hyphen floating in mid-air when it peeked out between two clouds.

2. Last week, I got tired of wanting dessert late at night and having nothing sweet in the house. So I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies Sunday night, but only baked the first dozen. I put the bowl in the fridge and every night, baked up a few more cookies. One night’s work translated to a week’s worth of dessert — always fresh and hot out of the oven.

3. Monday brought masses of people out to protest oppressive immigration reforms that have been proposed by some members of Congress and the White House. It was tremendous to see people who frequently try to blend into the background step into the foreground and demand to be seen and heard. They marched past my building after the rallies draped in American flags and chanting, “Si se puede!” And I believe we can.

Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. I worked two weekends during the winter, which gave me a few days to play with. I’m taking two today and tomorrow and heading north for the holidays. It’s nice that it’s 10 a.m., I haven’t taken a shower yet or even eaten breakfast. (I will have to kick it up a notch momentarily, but it’s been a great morning!)

2. On Sunday, we went out to brunch to celebrate our friend Sarah’s birthday. (Hi Sarah!). After our Mexican food, it was decided that we should head down to the Mall and recline in the sun in the Sculpture Garden. We plunked ourselves down beneath a kinetic sculpture and basked in a gorgeous spring afternoon. It was just as if someone had plucked a moment out of my college days.

3. Monday after work I headed over to our friends’ house to pick up our season baseball tickets. Pat and Heidi are the parents of Jack, who is 1 1/2, and the upcoming recipients of the unfinished mouse booties. Jack is adorable and generally has the sweet disposition of a child who has been brought up by grounded parents and who has been socialized early and often. But because he’s now mobile, he doesn’t get taken out to the pubs or restaurants anymore, so I rarely get to see him. Heidi promised I could have lots of cuddling and play time with him and his siblings this summer. Since I live far away from the other children in my life, it was nice to get this offer and nice to spend some toddler time with Jack the other night.

How likely is it that I would be fired if I wrote into the small-print publication info at the beginning of the book I’m editing that the reason this book is incomprehensible to anyone other than rocket scientists is because it was funded and edited (and stronghanded) by the very same?

I can’t wait to put this project in a drawer.

I have a coworker who likes to raid my candy jar. Because I also like to raid my candy jar, I tend to keep it empty.

At some point this week, this coworker must have checked the jar and discovered it was empty and, kindly, bought some jelly beans to fill it with.

Now, she’s in my office every half hour to have a snack. Really, they’re just her jelly beans, moved far away from her desk.

Particularly since these jelly beans are spicy jelly beans. They taste weird — orange mint, cinnamon, licorice, spearmint, and yellow, whose taste is not immediately identifiable and is, therefore, the least offensive.

Aloo saag is good when spicy. And pasta sauce. Curly fries, too.

But definitely not jelly beans.

But I want jelly beans to taste like fruit. (Not, of course, that the fruity jelly beans actually taste like the fruit they are supposed to, but they at least taste like the candy flavorings of those fruits.)

So I stopped out at lunch and bought some fruity jelly beans. [As a side note to my one known vegan reader, Confectionery Lane’s jelly beans, which I bought at CVS for $.50, do not contain gelatin.]

They’ve been added to the candy jar mix, hopefully giving everyone who stops by a chance to end up with a good jelly bean.

I’ve had a disconnected week. Last Saturday, I missed our friend Michael’s play reading because I thought it was on Sunday. Nevermind that the second invitation he sent me said that it was part of a “Saturdays @ 2” series…

Yesterday, I couldn’t figure out what to wear for spring weather. Neither what clothes nor what shoes were appropriate for 65 degrees and sunny seemed to be in my closet. I grew up in New England. Spring weather shouldn’t be that hard for me…

Today, I just went mildly crazy trying to figure out where a document draft was that I’d been working on had gone to. The intern who’d been looking at it had finished her responses and I wanted to input them. Not on my desktop. Not in my email. Was it on my key drive? The hard drive at home?

Yeah. I never actually had a draft I was working from. I’d joined this project after the document had been laid out once, so I’ve been giving our art director corrections written onto the laid out draft.

This may be why any readers had to wait for a post for three-plus days. My brain seems to have gone on vacation.

I’m hoping that taking my body on a long weekend away and time with friends will help to clear out my head of all the cobwebs and to reunite me with my brain. It could work…