Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A new poem, “The Health of Us,” by poetry goddess Claudia Rankine.

2. My coworkers and I were fast off the mark when an email announced to the entire building that there were leftovers available for lunch. I had a very tasty chipotle portobello sandwich.

3. Our season’s final volleyball match fell on the birthday of our captain, who brought the cookies her boss gave her to share with us after our resounding loss.

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

I have been working on these fingerless mitts for three years nearly to the day. (Please note, of the three projects shown, only one is done.) I refuse to think another Christmas season will come without my getting to wear them, so I’m saying here that they will be done and on my hands by next Friday.

I bound off the first one (on the right) last Christmas using a sewn picot bind-off that I wasn’t happy with. It felt bunchy and rolled outward, and I may have misjudged the evenness of the rows, because the picots didn’t really pop or look pretty, which would seem to thwart the point of having them in the first place. So a couple weeks ago, when looking for a project to take Coffeeneuring, I pulled these out and decided to see what other options I had for creating a pretty top edging. While this still rolls outward (anyone have a solution for that?), it solves the other problems, so I can probably live with it.

Thanks to knitting (and washing dishes), I’m into the final chapters of the audiobook of The Heist, by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. The book I want to be reading is in the center of the photo, Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon, which I’m enjoying quite a bit. The books I should be reading, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies, both need to be back in the library by Sunday to avoid fines. Nonfiction is just slower. And requires thinking. And just feel exhausting this month. But the hold list for both is months long (even when someone doesn’t keep them out late). We’ll see…

I always read more in the summer, so I’ll break up the reading from those months into a couple posts, because no one has the patience to read my thoughts on nine books in one go. (Or, more accurately, I don’t have the patience to post them all at once.)

So here are the first couple books I read during June (it was supposed to be four, but I’ve been stuck on the latter two for a month now, so it’s time to just get something up):

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, by Vaseem Khan

On the day Inspector Chopra retires from the Mumbai police force, he discovers his favorite uncle has died, leaving him the titular bequest, which turns out to be a baby elephant. But before we can get to the pachyderm (which is going to be a problem since he and his wife live in a middle-class high-rise with a rather ornery woman heading up the condo board), we must first deal with the workplace farewell. Middle-aged Inspector Chopra loves his job. He’s very good at his job. He doesn’t want to leave his job. But he’s had some heart trouble, and between pressures from his wife and the Indian bureaucracy, he’s been forced to leave the force early. He has instructions his final day is meant to be strictly a formality; his jurisdiction as head of his station has already passed onto another, who’ll arrive the following day. But when a young man from a lower-class section of town dies and his mother comes in to complain that it’s been dismissed as suicide when her son couldn’t possibly have been suicidal, Chopra doesn’t have the heart to show her the door. He quietly orders some extra tests to be conducted on the body, with the plan he’ll return later in the week to pass on the information to his successor. But when that man turns out to be a drunk and when the autopsy turns up some abnormalities and when sitting around the apartment with his wife and mother-in-law turns out not to be any fun, Chopra decides to split his time between unofficially investigating the young man’s death and figuring out what to do with a baby elephant who is literally wasting away while chained up on the common lawn of his building. He’ll spend his time consulting vets and zookeepers and low-lifes alike while trying to keep all his activities from his loving wife.

Written by an Englishman who spent ten years working in India, the story is a little slower than I would have liked, but still ultimately was an enjoyable tale. Chopra and his wife (from whose perspective we get about a third of the story) are good characters, and the end of the book suggests this could become an ongoing series. If you like Tarquin Hall’s Vish Puri detective series, I’d suggest giving this a try, as well. If anyone has any recommendations for contemporary Indian detective series written by actual Indians, I’d be eager to check them out.

Pages: 314. Library copy.

Baba Yaga’s Assistant, by Marika McCoola with illustrations by Emily Carroll

In this graphic novel, a motherless teenager whose father is getting remarried to a woman with an obnoxious little girl of her own decides to answer the help wanted ad Baba Yaga places in the newspaper seeking a new assistant. Having grown up on her grandmother’s detailed stories about Baba Yaga and how the witch could be outsmarted, Masha is prepared to move to the woods and use her wits to gain access to the witch’s walking home. But when one of Baba Yaga’s instructions involves cooking and children and one of those kids turns out to be her new step-sister, well, Masha is going to have to get even more creative.

I wanted to like this book more, although I can’t pinpoint where, exactly, it fell flat for me. Aimed at a middle-grade audience, it’ll likely appeal to anyone with an interest in Russian/Slavic lore.

Pages: 132. Library copy.

Stay tuned for the next installment of June’s reads, hopefully coming soon to a blog near you!

Coffeeneuring #6: Grace Street Coffee and Dog Tag Bakery (3210 and 3206 Grace St., N.W., Georgetown)

Sunday, Nov. 6; 6 miles
Masala chai and roasted pear and ginger tart (split with Rudi)

Rudi’s and my plan was to ride up to Beach Drive, enjoy the fall colors of Rock Creek Park, and then find someplace for a drink. It started out fine, but at the Taft Bridge, cyclists were coming up the hill to say that the gate was locked at the zoo, making that route impassable. I didn’t fancy going up and around, just to get back down again, so I decided we’d seen enough foliage and, after fooling around on the exercise equipment and snapping a few photos, that we should just skip to the hot drinks.

Rudi said a friend had recommended Grace Street Coffee, a new coffeehouse in Georgetown, so we decided to check them out. Located down the street from Dog Tag Bakery and Chaia Tacos, Grace Street shares its modern space with a juice bar and a gourmet sandwich shop. They also have a back garden with seating, which probably gets some nice sun in the early part of the day.

We took our drinks across the street to the park along the canal, and I ran into Dog Tag to get us a munchie. The ginger-pear tart was delicious and substantial enough I didn’t mind sharing with Rudi. My masala chai was, however, the spiciest drink I have ever had; I’m pretty sure there’s now hair on my chest. (Ew!) While this makes a nice change from the overly bland chais I often encounter in D.C., it would have been inedible without a snack and water to clear the palate.

Grace Street has hardly any space for bike parking, which is really its only drawback, and its sidewalks are very narrow. Rudi and I ended up finding an alcove and locking our bikes together. If you end up going, I’d suggest bringing a cable lock, rather than a U lock. (Or, even better, there’s a Bikeshare station at the end of the block…)

The knitting is a hat I hadn’t picked up since fall, with a complicated pattern, a misplaced stitch marker, and no notes on a pattern stored on my phone. The book is the second part of the Vivian Apple series of apocalyptic, feminist YA fiction. (more…)

I’ll be honest: After Tuesday, all I really wanted to do was to take to my bed and stay there. So, Saturday morning, I did just that, not getting up until I was done being asleep. But the problem with post-return to standard time is that the sun sets here at 5. Therefore, sleeping until afternoon is not really as good a thing as it is in the height of summer, when the final daylight drips from the sky close to 10.

I biked over to the library to pick up a book I had on hold, and then meandered around Georgetown for a bit.

Rudi came home from his bike ride, and we headed to the grocery store, coming home with three bags of supplies. (It’s less exciting than it sounds; toilet paper and cat litter take up a lot of space.)

We enjoyed burgers for supper and watched Saturday Night Live.

This morning, we got up early and were off to the farmers market, arriving home just in time for the moment of nature on CBS Sunday Morning. I had time for a muffin and a cup of tea before I had to race off to the garden where I met a fellow gardener to help rake up leaves from the park for our compost bins. Afterwards, I picked two beans, three peppers, and the final tomatoes from the plants.

Rudi and I went for a bike ride in the afternoon, heading over to a cafe he knew of past Georgetown. We sat in the sun for a while, and I started a book and found my place in a piece of knitting that had been sitting for ages.

This evening, Rudi had plans, so I took myself up to the park to enjoy the final rays of sun with a thermos of tea and my book.

At home for the night, I did some laundry, made a sandwich for supper, and baked a batch of cookies, before finishing my novel.

It was a good weekend, and while I’m glad I got some sleep, I’m glad I got up, too.

How was your weekend?