Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I leave Rudi a note on the white board. He leaves me a cheerful drawing in return.

2. Sarah accepts my invitation to meet for dinner and then lets me vent my grumpiness. I feel so much better afterwards.

3. The A Team has made its way back into Netflix’s streaming service and makes perfect sick-day tv.

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

I’m still working on my Lightning Shawl and am loving the color changes along and between the panels and the bright hues of the yarn on such grim winter days. I am excited to wear it, even if that doesn’t seem likely for Hungary.

I’ve got a couple different physical books I’m wrapping up, but am listening to Anne Ursu’s Breadcrumbs, a modern retelling of the Snow Queen that seems especially apt in a week that involved several days of shoveling and a cold between two weekends of being home alone.

I’m looking forward to the start of Sock Madness next week and to picking a couple non-library books to take with me on vacation. My audio book selection is already downloaded to my phone — the fifth Harry Potter.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Waves of cold radiating off the top layers of my scarf as I unwind it: they didn’t reach my neck.

2. Forgetting this week is the conference a friend comes to town for every year. Getting to have dinner with him anyway.

3. Rudi took the long weekend off from coaching in order to spend my birthday and Valentine’s Day with me. I haven’t had a weekend with him since Christmas. Then to get an extra day off for snow.

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

Today’s Ten on Tuesday topic is Ten Things I Am Looking Forward to Right Now:

1. My upcoming trip to Hungary.
2. Our friend’s birthday party tomorrow evening.
3. The return of volleyball next week. (A snow day means the venue is closed, so no game today.)
4. Vegetables. (The 4-day weekend involved an awful lot of delicious, tasty carbs and now I’m jonesing for some healthy fare.)
5. Sock Madness. (Starting March 1)
6. The Ninja Book Swap I signed up for. (Buying presents for — and receiving them from — random strangers on the internet is surprisingly satisfying.)
7. Picking up my books from the library. (The Georgetown Branch was closed 2 1/2 days for a broken water pipe, 1 day for the holiday, and 1 day for the snow.)
8. Spring flowers. (Seeing the snowdrops last week — now buried under five inches of actual snow — was too tantalizing and is exacerbated by Twitter pictures of magnolias blooming in Louisiana.)
9. Pi(e) Day. (Rudi may or may not be in town, but I feel like it needs celebrating anyway this year.)
10. Rearranging our living room. (Rudi and I talked about it this weekend and are on board with the first major furniture shift in ages.)

How about you? What are you looking forward to right now?

Three beautiful things from the week before my birthday:

1. D.C.’s winter has been rather lackluster, so it was a nice change to spend a few days in Connecticut, where it has been winter for about 67 years so far in 2015.

2. A patch of snowdrops in a neighborhood front yard.

3. A week’s worth of Valentine’s Day socks.

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

Tonight has been an evening of starts and finishes. I plowed through the final 100 pages of Katie Fforde’s Practically Perfect, a sweet romance set in an English village where Anna has just bought a cottage she’s renovating. There’s not a lot in the way of character development, particularly once you reach the secondary characters, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t overly treacly, and I found myself missing the characters when I opted to take a different book with me to Connecticut last weekend.

While in Connecticut I finished the cowl I was test knitting (and which I’ll share with you once I have the designer’s go-ahead to do so), so needed either to cast on something new or pick up something old. I opted for both by pulling out my Lightning Shawl, which is knit in strips. Yes, I did cast on the next strip just for the sake of the blog post. And, yes, it took me three tries to realize that I’d used a different cast-on than what I’d expected on the previous strips. But we’re good now (I hope) and it’s not out of the question that this could be done in time to take with me to Hungary as a completed accessory.