This post ought to be substantial, grounded, focused. It ought to include photos of the garden’s latest harvest (including the magic zucchini) or of my knitting (both knit-along projects are in progress). It ought to be productive about rallying people to protest the underhanded sale of my local branch library by the city council. It ought to be … about something.

But instead all I can offer you is this. This evening after work, it was only July. But now, eight hours later, it’s already January at Hogwarts. Come Friday at midnight, it will be July again. I’ve only got 71 hours to get through the next five months — and a harrowing, event-filled five months they will be.

So my apologies if posts are light — or, worse, inconsequential. I’m looking for clues for what’s to come…

The weekend was filled, but not in a hurry-up kind of way.

Friday night, we met up with three friends for some jazz under the stars (okay, it was really jazz under the setting sun, but close enough). John brought cherries, wine and Swiss chocolates (yum!), and Michael and Julia were able to join us even though they already didn’t have enough time to get things done. I stopped for some crackers and various cheeses and hummus and paired them with some wine and sparkling pomegranate juice we had at home. It really was a lovely, relaxing start to the weekend and I hope we’ll be able to do it again.

Saturday, I did manage to get my lazy butt out and on the bike for a 12-mile ride. I promised myself that if I resisted the impulse to buy a frozen Snickers bar at the boat house that I could stop at the LYS. I did, but perhaps spoiled the incentive by spotting a table selling freshly made crepes in honor of Bastille Day and benefiting breast cancer charities. I mean, passing by would have been misanthropic and xenophobic, right?

I did a little cleaning and then read more before eventually calling it a night.

Sunday rolled around bright and early. We hit the farmers’ market relatively early and came away with a bounty of berries — cherries, blueberries, blackberries, and black raspberries — as well as an armload of flowers, tomatoes, nectarines, peaches, lettuce, corn, and a Jamaican spinach called callaloo. We ate scones, read the paper, knit, talked to ejbro on the phone, and watched Tour de France coverage. (Let’s pretend the scones were in honor of the Tour’s start in London.)

In the afternoon, Rudi and I headed to the pool, where we spent a wonderful hour or so floating and basking in the cool water before heading by Trader Joe’s and the garden on our way home.

All in all, it was a lovely weekend. Would that it could have lasted a bit longer, since this week is looking more busy than relaxed. We have tickets to two ball games, a local vote, and a visit with an old friend scheduled already, and we’ve recently learned that we need to spend some time harassing the D.C. Council about a recent ill-considered vote. Good thing vacation starts next week!

I’m pleased to announce that I will be spending this weekend as weekends are meant to be spent — lazing.

I’m hoping to start the weekend off right with some friends tonight at a free jazz concert in the sculpture garden outside the National Gallery of Art.

Tomorrow morning, I will get up and go for a bike ride. I signed up for the third round of Runagogo! and fully intend to meet the 100 mile goal (over the course of 3 months) this time. Plus, I’ve been drinking a lot of sweet beverages and eating a lot of ice cream lately and it would behoove me to get moving. In a similar vein, I may try to get in some laps at the local community pool when I head over to the garden.

Speaking of which, I need to do some planting. The peas are done for the season and I see no reason to let the string lattice go to waste. So I’m going to plant some more beans there. Rudi’s mom has also suggested that we cut back the catnip and maybe the sage, so that will be another task. We might have some ripe peppers to harvest in addition to the broccoli and lettuce, so I’m excited about that.

I’m about a third of the way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I don’t find it unreasonable to expect to be done with it by Sunday night. That gives me five days to plow through the penultimate book before the new one comes out at midnight on Friday night. We’ll be attending a launch party at Politics & Prose and are currently contemplating costumes. That robe I bought for grad school is going to come in handy again, methinks…

I’ll also be knitting. I’m nearly done with my first pair of socks for the Summer of Socks, in a lovely colorway of Cascade Fixation. I just have to finish the gusset decreases and the foot and I’ll be able to wear them with my pink Keds.

And I have to go buy some cotton/linen/hemp/nonstretchy fiber for a market bag. That’s the project I’m supposed to be working on right now for the Tour de France Knit-along. However, a week into the race, I’m still in London while the other riders race toward the Alps. Tant pis! But Bastille Day does seem like a good time to catch up, so I will play some Les Nubians albums and the soundtrack to Les Miserables and get to work.

Finally, the farmers’ market, is, as always, on my weekend agenda. The market folks warn this may be the final week for cherries and apricots, so I’ll need to pick some of those up, as well as more blueberries and tomatoes and beans and …

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Running through a downpour to get back to the office for lunch. I laugh as I go.

2. The skies suddenly open as if someone has slit the clouds. We, however, are mosty-toasty inside the Burrow.

3. A man in drab neutral colors is surrounded by his wife and four daughters, all dressed in vibrant hues — orange and pink and lime and turquoise.

We’re off to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I’m excited to see Lupin and Sirius again. I find them some of the more endearing characters in the book series and the film casting has definitely grown on me over time. In fact, it was really too bad that Sirius’ role from the fourth book was cut down to one scene, although I understand that not everything written in a 700-page book will fit into a two-hour movie.

I’ll also be happy to see Mrs. Weasley back, because I love her. I think we all need a Mrs. Weasley in our lives…

It’s looks ready to start pouring out right now, which will make the us a bit soggy for the movie, but I don’t care!

We’re very excited about seeing the film at the great, old-style Uptown Theatre a few miles up the road from us in D.C. We’ll be particularly happy if we get seats up in the balcony, which is truly a wonderful place to see a movie from!

I can’t wait!

Photo courtesy of KCIvey, under the Creative Commons agreement.

It’s not that I haven’t been having fun. The contrary, in fact, is true; I think it’s that I’ve been having too much fun and I find myself too tired (and hot, frankly) to blog at the end of the day.

We’ve rewatched the Harry Potter movies in preparation for tomorrow night’s debut of Order of the Phoenix. We have tickets for Wednesday evening at the Uptown, a single-screen theater with a balcony (where we hope to sit), so it was imperative that we finish up this evening.

Tonight, we ate in front of the tv by candlelight — a cold dinner of mozzarella, purple basil, and tomato; baguette, goat cheese, and tomato; ambrosia; and iced tea and beer. It was lovely.

Saturday, while Rudi rode a crazy mountainous bike ride, I stayed inside, knitting, reading, and watching Venus Williams’ victory at Wimbledon. Late in the evening, after discovering that it had finally cooled down to a more reasonable 75 degrees, we ventured out to a local restaurant for a nightcap of s’mores (the local celebration of Grey Kitten’s 33rd birthday (on 07/07/07) out in San Diego).

And Sunday, after tramping through the farmers’ market (corn on the cob!) and watching a terrific men’s tennis match between Federer and Nadal, we met up with our friend John and headed down to the Mall for the final day of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This year’s highlighted regions/cultures were: the Mekong River (which runs through China, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia) cultures, the roots of Virginia, and Northern Ireland. Should you ever get the chance to attend this event (which runs the last week of June and the first week of July), it is really a fantastic way to get glimpses of culture and food and craft from places you might never get to see. The highlight of our time Sunday afternoon had to be the “Cookin’ Cleric,” a down-home Presbyterian minister who walked us through making scones (p. 14-15) the way his mother made them. He was chatty and the experience was similar to what it would be if you sat down in someone’s kitchen to learn an old family recipe (if, of course, their kitchen were outside and 95 degrees and filled with bleachers and microphones and assistants). It was hot as blazes, but it was nice to spend some time with John, whom we hadn’t seen in a month or so, and to take advantage of one of the great free resources D.C. has to offer.