I escaped the day with nary a fish taped to my back, but the universe got me back by work keeping me (and a bunch of my coworkers) until nearly 9 p.m. Yikes! I biked home, ate lentils, and promptly dozed off on the unmade bed. But I’m back up to help make the bed, wash the dinner dishes, and write a blog post before heading to sleep for the night.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. As I biked home tonight, a tourist family crossed a major road where I was stopped at the light. Halfway across the street, the youngest child lost the jacket tied around his waist. When they eventually reach the sidewalk I overhear the mother chastise her daughter, saying that the middle of the street wasn’t the place to laugh, even if she had thought it was her brother’s trousers lying in the intersection. “But if it hadn’t been the middle of the road, it would have been okay to laugh?” the girl dead-panned.

2. While Rudi skis, Jenny and I spend a quiet hour knitting socks and watching a documentary on Zora Neale Hurston on PBS.

3. Sitting in the parking lot before Rudi’s reunion banquet, I see the nearly full moon rising over the eastern mountains just as the sun is setting over the western ones.

What’s been beautiful in your world this week? New family members? First blooms? A dry basement? Share it with us, please!

An NPR story led me to This Day in Music, a website that will tell you the top song on any given day in the U.S., U.K., or Australia.

Plugging in my 1974 birthday gives me these hits:

Down Under, it was David Bowie’s glam rock number, “Sorrow”:

In the U.S., we get a rare instrumental, “Love’s Theme,” from Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra:

And in Great Britain, they were rocking out to Mud’s “Tiger Feet”:

I think I like the last one best, although this may be the first time I’ve ever heard it. What are some of the songs from important dates in your history? Leave them in the comments…

Once again, I am planning to take part in Carl’s Once Upon a Time Challenge. My plan is to explore Quest the Fourth, wherein I commit to reading five books that fall within the genres of fairy tales, folklore, mythology, and fantasy. Then I will follow that up with an early June reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In addition to the Shakespeare, I hope to choose from:

Kristin Cashore’s Graceling
Michael Scott’s The Sorceress
Homer’s The Odyssey
Arabian Nights
Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Rick Riordan’s The Last Olympian
Shannon and Dean Hale’s Rapunzel’s Revenge
Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch
Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember
Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men
Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Got any other suggestions? Or recommendations from the list above? I’ve got until Midsummer’s Eve to finish reading them all.