Here’s what happening around me:

Hearing: The a/c running. The fridge making settling noises.

Feeling: Corey purring as he lies with his full weight against my left wrist. (He thinks I have difficulty blogging without him lying on me in some way, preferably over at least one wrist and a paw or his chin on my boobs. He is not ergonomically correct.)

Smelling: Not mildew. Rudi had the day off today and he put the braided rug back down in the living room for the first time since the flood.

Seeing: Hope Never Dies, lying spread-eagle in front of me where I put it down after reading the first few chapters earlier.

Tasting: Toothpaste is the predominant taste, but there’s still a hint of the garlic from the delicious tagine Rudi made earlier.

I’ll show you some photos of my time in San Francisco tomorrow, when I’m a little more awake. But tonight I thought I’d share what I splurged and brought home from the course of my vacation day, when I stopped at two indie bookshops and two local record stores:

First the music: I bought two used cds (I still prefer cds): Holly Near’s and still we sing, a two-disc set, and Woody Guthrie at 100! Live at the Kennedy Center, a cd/dvd tribute concert. It includes performances from a variety of luminaries including Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash, Donovan, Judy Collins, and Sweet Honey in the Rock.

The books include a signed copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark; a collection of poems & short prose pieces about San Francisco gentrification by Tony Robles, Cool Don’t Live Here No More; and two novels in translation, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat and Juan Villoro’s middle-grade The Wild Book, about a boy who turns out to be a magical reader (which I already started on the flight home).

Oh, and one more thing — I bought a tote bag to hold all my purchases with the cool cat as record player design.

I didn’t mean to buy quite so much, but I decided music and books were a good splurge.

I’d expected free wi-fi time on my red-eye flight, but couldn’t get it to work, so you’re getting a shot of a Chicago sunrise instead that I’m posting as we load our flight to National.

Home in a couple of hours. I can’t wait!

I spent today working, so here’s a shot from my plane window yesterday looking over the western coast of Florida.

It’s late and I’ve been traveling all day and … I just woke up from dozing off in the middle of that sentence a couple hours ago.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I was home when we flooded. Rudi was away for the weekend and things would have been bad if I had gone with him.

2. I bought some hummus & pita chips at the D.C. airport before leaving, which I did not need for my first flight today, but that came in handy for my second.

3. Clouds are just really cool when you’re looking down on them.

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

The final Unraveled Wednesday of the month finds me without having made much progress since last week on my Tour de France shawl, although I think the color changes (from pink and violet to salmon and a more reddish-violet) are more obvious now. I do have a lot of airplane knitting between now and Sunday when the cyclists reach Paris, but I am also really good at airplane sleeping, which seems a likely scenario, particularly since one of those flights is a red eye.

I started Audacity Jones to the Rescue on the metro this morning. She’s a plucky orphan whose philosophy is, “Everything will turn out splendid in the end. If it’s not splendid, it’s not the end,” which seems as good a life philosophy as any to me.

Apologies for the short post, but I have a plane to catch tomorrow and haven’t started packing…

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