Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Our family has birthdays in spurts. July has already held my dad’s sister’s and father’s birthdays; his middle brother’s birthday is toward the end of the month. Because my grandfather and my Aunt Carrie are no longer with us, my dad sends out memories to the rest of the family via email. These missives always set me off a little bit, but generally the tears are good ones for memories of big family gatherings when I was a kid. My Aunt Dort just sent an email sharing some of her memories of Grampa, too, which is particularly nice because I didn’t know him as well as I’d have liked.

2. Dad’s email last weekend about my Aunt Carrie made me think back to some of my memories of her. The year I got out of college I wanted to make cookies for my dad, but my grandmother had died too early for her to teach me how to make Gramma Cookies, so Aunt Carrie provided me with the secret recipe. Aunt Carrie is also the one who could always be counted on to send me a Valentine’s Day birthday card, even well into my college years, sometimes with a little extra something tucked in to help me celebrate. And the last few years, when she was sick, she was always excited to talk with me about yoga. She particularly liked the tree pose, saying she could just feel roots growing from her foot into the earth when she did it. She was like that with the family — offering us great stability and serving as a grounding force over the years.

3. My dad and Dort both wrote about my grandfather’s love of television and maybe that’s one of the most consistent memories I have of him. We’d go over to visit once a week and while Mum and Dad and Gramma sat in the kitchen and talked, Josh and I would go into the living room and watch tv with Grampa, who let us watch all sorts of things on cable that probably no one else would have let us watch back in the day. We saw some baseball, but we loved music videos and Grampa would let us put on VH1 and just let the music play. We also watched tv shows that would have been off-limits at home, like Hawaii Five-Oh or movies. I particularly remember watching the entirety of Starman in their Ansonia living room.

Jeremiah would like to tell everyone that he’s the alpha cat in the house, but if you came over he’d bolt for the closet, leaving Della to encourage you to draw your own conclusions. Perceiving danger, my poor boy has, in the past, hidden under the toilet tank, under our futon, and under a 9-inch high, 9-inch wide stool.

There was no imminent danger last week when a box arrived in the mail, so Jer was able to hang out in something as opposed to under it.

(I offer this up as a contribution for Whiskers on Wednesday, a weekly meme featuring some much beloved felines.)

I’m feeling a little under the weather today, so I’m going to forgo writing a post and instead send you to the post I wrote for America’s Knitting on D.C.’s Stitch ‘n’ Pitch.

It’s sans byline, but I swear I wrote it. 😉

Anyone can see the coverage of “The Capitol Fourth” — D.C.’s Fourth of July celebration — on PBS, but I’ve always thought it irritating the way they fade out while the fireworks are still going on.

If you live here, as Sarah mentioned this morning, you have a spot to head to avoid the Mall crowds if you so desire. Personally, I like the Mall, but we opted to go the easy route of skipping security by heading over to the deck of the Kennedy Center, which overlooks the Potomac River. It’s not as nice as being down by the Lincoln Memorial, but it’s definitely less crowded (which is a huge advantage, in my book) and it’s still close enough to the launch site to be able to feel the thunder of the blasts.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

It’s the Thursday before a long weekend here in the U.S., so shortly things will be even more beautiful than normal with three whole days stretching luxuriously before me. Before we can look forward to that, however, I need to share three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Now that we have a date for the fall wedding we’ll be attending (thanks for sharing it so quickly, Karen!), we’re narrowing in on dates for a vacation. It looks like we’ll be heading to France between Election Day and Thanksgiving (probably Nov. 5-15). I love research, so this part of vacation planning is almost as fun as the vacation itself for me. Anyone have any suggestions of things to do/places to go while in France?

2. The reassuring feeling of wet sand between my toes at the seaside.

3. I’m loving the sock I’m working on right now. The yarn is self-striping, which is always interesting, and the pattern consists of only two rows, one of which is all-knit. It’s very meditative to knit and quite addictive because I get to the end of a round and want to knit just one more round before I stop. I think I’ll be done with the toe tonight.

Rain is good for a garden. It keeps things green and lush.

It is also good for the gardener, because then she does not need to lug water from home. However, nothing comes without a price because it also means that she’s supposed to do this thing called weeding.

Clearly, this is a foreign concept to our intrepid gardener. (Don’t click on that photo, Mum. You’ll disinherit me.)

Ahem. Obviously you can guess where some of my long weekend will be spent.

Since last month, my peas and beans have grown a bit. The peas have mostly gone by for the season, but my beans are thriving. It was a mistake to plant them all together as the beans overtook the peas, so next year I’ll have a series of tee pees.