This weekend was the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, and today I drove myself north to have some fun.

I arrived earlier than I have in years, just after 2, which gave me slightly under 3 hours to soak up the whole festival. Even with that, I still didn’t have enough time to see the last section of vendors, so I’m thinking next year I should aim for an hour earlier.

The first thing I did was head inside the animal barns. While some are quieter than others, generally these are busy, loud places. Farmers are shearing sheep. Sheep are bleating. Announcers are calling for animals and their handlers to get into place for judging.

They want to make sure everyone looks their best:

There were adult sheep:

And there were lambs:

I was able to catch the final sheepdog demonstration of the day. The shepherd who runs it has brought a new partner on and the two women had six dogs to help with the task, ranging in age from one year old to 14. Each of them felt that they should be the dog to keep those sheep in check and were quick to judge their compatriots’ work.

Then, it was off to look at yarn. There was a lot of yarn. I didn’t take pictures of most them. I also didn’t take photos of the plant vendors, where I bought tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, potatoes, and basil.

Finally, as I promised, I didn’t go looking for yarn, but my plan was to remain open to a skein or two speaking to me. Well, here’s the one that shot straight to my heart:

This is Coquette Sock Yarn from Bumblebee Acres Fiber Farm. It’s a Corriedale/nylon blend. And the obvious reason this yarn was able to call out to me? The colorway is Soot Sprites 💜 Rainbows.

It’s like they knew me, don’t you think?

Bring May flowers on my Brassica.

It also brings peas now almost knee-high.

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And strawberries and greens. (Strawberries not pictured here.)

As expected, though, the heat did in my violets. I harvested about a dozen of what remained, but even many of them were past peak. I suppose I’ll have to move to picking dandelions next!

This weekend looks to be a busy one — lots of things going on:

• There’s a garden cleanup and social tomorrow morning. Part of the fence along my plot got broken when they took down one of the trees over it last month, so I’m hoping we can find a replacement that’s long enough.
• But first I want to get up early and make a coffee cake to take. I will remember to take the butter out of the fridge before I go to bed. (If I fail in this, there are other options that can be purchased.)
• Then it’s the open house day for non-EU nations. Because I won’t be able to go in the morning, because of the long lines, and because I’ve been to a bunch of embassies in past years, a strategic plan is necessary. I’m thinking there are five on the far side of Dupont Circle I haven’t visited yet that might work — Uzbekistan, Micronesia, Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, and the Philippines. Hopefully some of them will have snacks to sample. (This is impressive; I don’t usually have a plan until I walk out the door.)
• And Free Comic Book Day. (I have two comic book shops nearby and I’m hoping one of them has the first volume of Rainbow Rowell’s Runaways.
• Sunday is the farmers market. We’ll need milk and asparagus, at the very least.
• Then it’s off to the north to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. I don’t need yarn, which is not to say that I won’t buy any, but it would need to be something special. I do need beads, although I don’t know if any of the vendors sell them. And I need tomato and other garden plants. And to see sheepdogs.
• Back in D.C., one of the women from my book group is doing a poetry reading. That one is really going to depend on my energy level.
• I have books waiting on hold at the library — and some things I’d like to get back to them.
• There is dirty laundry to be washed. There are warm weather clothes that need to get moved into the bureau. There are cold weather clothes that could be put away.
• Rearrange the kitchen. Rudi built our new cart a couple weeks ago [I asked him if you’d texted, Mum, when he volunteered that was part of his plan for his day off.] and moved some things onto it, but not the things I wanted to have go there, so we’ll have to see if some compromise can be reached.
• Sit in the park tomorrow night if it’s not raining. (We got chased home by the sudden onslaught of rain tonight.)
• Knit on a sock. I made some good progress during the author event we attended last night.

How about you? What are you hoping your weekend holds?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I planted tomato seeds a couple weeks ago. This week four little seedlings appeared in the container by my office window.

2. I won tickets to an author event with Marcia Gay Harden that took place on the rooftop of one of the recent additions to the cityscape. The views looking down on the city were impressive. (Also, it was totally upper middle-class yuppie, but the rooftop, filled with its communal reading nooks, fire pit, barbecue space, garden room, and seating areas, really was quite amazing.) It’s always so amazing to see how much green there is!

3. The weather has been hot during the daytime this week, but I’ve been able to spend the nights outdoors, sitting outside an assortment of cafes and restaurants. (I’ve also made sure to get outside at lunchtime to soak up some Vitamin D.)

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

The April Hamildrops was released earlier this week, and this time it’s an early version of Eliza’s simmering “Burn,” in which she reacts to her husband’s sharing his infidelity publicly and of his own free will, sung by five of the women who’ve portrayed her. Not only does the song contain some amazing female harmonies (the sort that make the hairs on my arm stand up), but it is interesting to see how the song evolved during the course of the songwriting process. That’s something I find fascinating. For instance, the difference between Dar Williams’ early demo of “The Christians and the Pagans” and the album version isn’t significant, but the changes make the Christmas song memorable, rather than something that fades into the background noise of mediocre holiday music as a whole. (I am less interested in the things Rudi finds interesting: the variation between recordings of a song. He has several bootlegs of various recordings of a single Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields,” maybe, and listening to an entire cd of just that song set my teeth on edge.)

Anyway, have a listen if you haven’t yet had the chance:

Look how cheerful my new sock is! I haven’t had enough time to sit with it to make a ton of progress, but I’m carrying it around with me and knitting on it a few minutes at a time and that’s enough right now.

On the reading front, I am listening to Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, which folks in my book group compared to Uprooted, which I loved. It’s unclear thus far whether that’s just because it’s set in Eastern Europe and fantastical or if there are more meaningful comparisons that will become obvious later on.

I am nearly done with Morgan Parker’s poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. It’s full of sex and the music and the Black female experience, both positive and negative, and I recommend reading it.

I have started Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi, but ran straight into the problem that a lot of books that are set in a place you know really well experience and that’s the incongruenties with your lived reality. The book references early on row houses on M Street. M Street in the section of D.C. where the story is taking places, is exclusively a retail section. And I know this is a minor detail and that I’ll get past it, but it just grated and something else came along in the meantime that I’m enjoying too much for me to go back to.

That something is A Dash of Trouble, the first in a planned series called Love Sugar Magic, a middle grade story of brujas who run a bakery and the youngest sister who stumbles onto the family secret a little earlier than she’s supposed to. This was also recommended to me from my book club (and apparently I have a fondness for magic bakery stories), and so, when I found it during Independent Bookstore Day blurbed by my favorite D.C. bookseller as being her favorite new series since Harry Potter, I bought myself a copy.

Next up (as soon as I remember to retrieve it from the bedroom when Rudi’s not sleeping in there) will be fellow Conn alum David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has won many accolades and which I hear is the sort of narrative nonfiction I particularly like. It’s a little more grisly than my normal reading, but is in keeping with the sort of books I read in college and grad school (when a lot of my studies focused on marginalized American cultures), so I’m hoping I can handle it.

As usual, head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are reading and crafting.