It’s a glorious spring Thursday in D.C. that began with cherry blossoms, had a farmers market lunch in the middle, and will conclude with our first baseball game of the season. If that’s not enough here are three other beautiful things from my past week:

1. A hibiscus-mint iced tea after biking without a water bottle on a 90-degree day.

2. New flip flops for the first day of sandal weather and a new cherry red dress for the first Nats game.

3. Scrubbing the dirt from my fingernails and hands after hours of working at the garden.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

I’m joining another reading challenge for 2013: What’s in a Name 6. I played along with this challenge a couple years back and think its requirements remain eclectic enough to amuse me.

Anyway, the point is that you choose six books based on criteria concerning their titles:

1. A book with up or down (or equivalent) in the title

2. A book with something you’d find in your kitchen in the title

3. A book with a party or celebration in the title

4. A book with fire (or equivalent) in the title

5. A book with an emotion in the title

6. A book with lost or found (or equivalent) in the title

With regards to the books I’ve read thus far this year, I’ve taken care of the emotional book with Wonder, but since I haven’t published any book reviews yet this year you’ll still have to wait to hear what I thought of it. (I also suppose Plum Lucky could fit in the kitchen item category, come to think of it…)

If you have suggestions for any of the other categories, feel free to leave them for me in the comments. Otherwise I’ll be scouring my TBR piles, the library shelves, and my Goodreads queue for likely contenders.

Look at what arrived in the mail today, smelling slightly like jelly beans through its packaging:

That would be my prize for the first round of Sock Madness (posing here with the second sock of the pair, currently in progress). It’s two bars of soap homemade by Julie in one of my favorite scents, violet.

But, Sprite, I can hear you say, weren’t you eliminated from competition in that opening round?

I was. But Sock Madness is one of those events where prizes are awarded at the discretion, kindness, and amusement of its moderators and for a wide assortment of reasons. (Mine was for persevering with the competition through difficult personal times.)

I’m still a little disappointed that I couldn’t have knit more/faster while in Salt Lake, but the sweetness of the prize and the generosity of the moderators (and the pattern designer, who helped me come up with a solution to the boneheaded mistake I made while trying to knit through exhaustion and stress) takes the bitterness out of my failure. It’s a true consolation prize.

One of the things on this weekend’s to-do list was to paint my nails, partly in recognition of the impending warming weather. I knew I’d want to wear sandals, and an incident earlier this year of wearing too-small shoes had left my toes contused and uglier than I’d like for revealing footwear.

So a cover-up was in order:

(Yes, my new flip flops do have cherry blossoms on them.)

And while I was at it, I wanted to try a new top coat I picked up after returning from Salt Lake:

As you can see, precision usually doesn’t worry me.

Spring arrived while I was in Salt Lake, leaving me pleased with the change in season, but unable to focus on the important aspects thereof, such as the beginning of the annual reading challenge, Once upon a Time, now in its seventh incarnation.

Now that I’m back and able to concentrate on books once again, I’m eager to participate. This year I’ll again be signing up for Quest the First, wherein I agree to, before summer begins:

Read at least 5 books that fit somewhere within the Once Upon a Time categories. They might all be fantasy, or folklore, or fairy tales, or mythology … or your five books might be a combination from the four genres.

I’m not yet sure which books I’ll read, but I did receive a Kristin Cashore novel as a belated birthday present, and both Seraphina and The Peculiar were shortlisted for the Cybils in their respective categories. I also have a tome of Icelandic mythology I bought before our trip a few years ago, but honestly 800 pages seems a bit daunting.

If you’ve got a recommendation for me to read in these categories before June 21, I welcome them.

Here are some of the things I’m hoping to do this weekend:

• Complete my shift at the garden clean-up day. Possibly also assess our plot. Consider turning over soil.
• Shop at the farmers market. Hopefully find ramps and maybe spring mushrooms.
• Do taxes. Or, at the very least, assemble paperwork necessary to doing them.
• Make something with apples in fridge.
• Finish reading my novel & return overdue books to library.
• View cherry blossoms. This will probably require rising at a ridiculously early hour to avoid tourists. Conversely, battle tourists. (As I think there may be fireworks tomorrow night, maybe I’ll brave the crowds as it gets toward dusk.)
• Read a chapter in a novel-in-progress that I’m behind in offering thoughts on.
• Find yarn for my grandmother’s shawl.
• Paint fingernails.
• Sit outside and knit and read.

How about you? What’s on your weekend to-do list?