Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I already devoted an entire post to them, but those sunflowers really merit inclusion for being a balm to the soul.

2. Rudi and I saw The Incredibles 2 on Tuesday night, which let out just in time for the final 20 minutes of Dirty Dancing showing across the street in the waterside park. Tonight, I headed up to my local park, where they were screening Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, while Rudi caught a 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey at one of the art houses.

3. I am a fan of the traditional Oreo flavor combination and tend not to believe in the mutations that have popped up in the past decade (different colors are okay, though). But I couldn’t pass up the chance to try their Fourth of July cookies, Firework Oreos, which had red and blue pop rocks embedded in the regular creme. The first two cookies I didn’t quite get the big deal, until Rudi told me I was eating them too quickly and that I had to let them sit on my tongue for a minute. Same great taste, but with little fizzing bursts that make your cat turn his head.

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

Rudi’s job has him working a non-standard week, which means his days off can vary. This week he was off today, so I decided to take a vacation day and join him for some time together before our disparate evening activities. The internet said that the sunflowers at Maryland’s McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area were in full bloom, and since we often see them at non-peak times we decided to take a day trip to catch them.

They were absolutely perfect:

If you have someplace growing sunflowers near you, may I suggest you plan a visit this summer? I can’t tell you how joyful these made us feel.

Here’s what I’ve knit so far on my Tour de France shawl. I opted for a different pattern than what I showed you last week. This is Around the Bend by Nim Teasdale.

The book is Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu. I’ve also been listening to Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki.

Visit As Kat Knits for more book/knitting combos.

As always, I’m behind on book reviews (although I have drafts of two more months of books in the works). I’m not going to give you the ten best titles of the first half of the year, which is this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic. But I will share the four books I’ve particularly enjoyed thus far, in case you’re looking for reading fodder:

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman, started out slowly for me and I thought about giving up due to Eleanor’s frustrating personality. I remember thinking that there had better be a good reason for her foibles … and there were. Eleanor is not, in fact, completely fine when the book begins, but by the end she is well on her way to it.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, focuses on a Russian nobleman who escapes being executed or sent to the work camps because of a poem he published when he was young expressing sympathy for the plight of the worker and for the Bolshevik uprising. Instead he is sentenced to house arrest in one of Moscow’s finest hotels, but instead of continuing to occupy his luxurious suite, he is banished to the attic, à la The Little Princess. Instead of moping, though, he finds the best in the situation — and in every other ensuing slight and setback — which positions him well for some very surprising scenarios and relationships.

Obsidio, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, was an excellent conclusion to the Illuminae Files trilogy. Set in space in the future (I want to say the 28th century, but I might be misremembering), the book wraps up the story of teenaged hackers, pilots, drug dealers, and tacticians fighting against intergalactic corporate greed and militarized thugs, and the formerly murderous AI who is helping them (they hope). This installment added a nurse and a soldier to the mix, and as with the earlier two books involves both a pictorial element to the storytelling and a fair amount of kissing.

Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann, relates a forgotten piece of American history — the systematic murder of members of the Osage tribe of Native Americans who, in the first few decades of the 20th century, were some of the richest people in the nation thanks to the discovery of oil on their reservation. While the contemporaneous investigation cemented the reputation of the FBI and did put those directly responsible behind bars, it neglected to realize the extent to which the paternalistic American government bore responsibility because of its refusal to recognize the autonomy of Native Americans, instead insisting that white people be given guardianship over them and their finances.

How about you? What have you read in the first half of the year that you loved and would recommend?

This was a not particularly exciting weekend. On Friday, we went out to eat at our favorite pizzeria, where they have outdoor seating.

Saturday, we watched some bike racing and I started my new knitting project. I did some chores. I went out to the suburbs to make a return and bought some new clothes. I also renewed my library card for the town adjacent to ours and checked out the (relatively) new space for one of the local yarn shops. (I came away empty-handed.)

Sunday, I went to the farmers market, where I was excited to find smoothie bowls had returned to one of my favorite baker’s stands. This week it was roasted peach. Yum. I went to the Cezanne exhibition. It was of his post-Impressionist portraits, so while I’m glad I went, I wasn’t as blown away as I would have been if it had been his Impressionist landscapes. (I did stop by the Impressionists before leaving the museum.) On the way home, I stopped by where Wonder Woman was being filmed. They’d populated a couple blocks with ’80s cars and extras with big shoulder pads and bigger hair. Unfortunately, no scenes were being shot when I stopped by and I decided I didn’t need to wait. I then hit up the pool, the garden, and the park, where Rudi met me after work and where we stayed until after the final notes of “Taps” had faded away.

So nothing overly exciting, but nothing terrible either. Just a low-key weekend.

Strawberries and peas are pretty much done for the season. I’ll pull out the pea vines this week and stop watering the strawberries.

I harvested my first tomatoes today. They aren’t ripe, but they had their first hint of color and I’ve learned that if I leave them until they get ripe, squirrels take a bite out of them and then leave the rest. Cheeky buggers. So instead, these — one bigger one and two yellow grape tomatoes — will ripen on my counter. I also had to add some more stakes to my biggest tomato plant, which was leaning dangerously far into the pathway, despite already taking up two cages.

I finally found a squash plant growing in my garden. I’d put down seeds for them and for beans last month.

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