It’s supposed to be a beautiful weekend here. After a scorcher of a week, we need it. I’m going to try to soak up as much of it as I can. Here’s what I hope it includes:

• Eat outside.
• Watch some bike racing.
• Start a new knitting project. (Nope, still no idea which it’ll be. Game time decision!)
• Stalk Wonder Woman. (They’re filming the second movie in the series here in D.C. This weekend it’s downtown near the White House. They did some filming last month outside the Watergate, where my friend Sarah works and they eventually had to send a P.A. up to ask them to stop watching from the window, since they were in the shot.)
• Pull out my pea vines. They were looking done for when I was at the garden on Wednesday, but there were a few more pods I wanted to give a shot to.)
• Admire Cezanne. (There’s a retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Art that I just heard about that ends on Sunday. Apparently I haven’t been paying attention to the art scene. But this requires heading to a Smithsonian on a summer weekend on a closing weekend, two things I try to avoid like a bad cold, so I might decide looking at his Wikipedia page is just as good…)
• Do laundry.
• Bake. (I pitted a couple quarts of cherries mid-week, but it was just too hot to turn on the oven.)
• Make daiquiris. (I have a lot of whole strawberries in my freezer right now.)
• Watch the sun set from the park.

How about you? What do you have on tap for the weekend?

Thursday means it’s time to reflect back on three beautiful things from my past week:

1. After having listened to the Hamilton soundtrack since before it was officially released, it was awesome to finally get to see the visuals that accompany the audio.

2. I bought a couple new bathing suits on sale online (actually, I bought more than a couple, but am only keeping two) and wore one to the pool this week to try it out in action. Rudi says it looks good and it neither pulled down nor rode up while jumping into the pool, swimming, and getting out, so I’d call that a success.

3. We got not one, but two, fireworks displays this week — one after the ballgame on Tuesday and one on the 4th over the Mall. This year’s new shaped fireworks included ones that looked like jellyfish. I didn’t manage to capture them on film, but maybe you saw them if they showed the entire display on PBS?

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

My reading has been all over the place this week. A chapter here, a poem there. A different book in each bag. Plus two audiobooks, both L.A. Theatre Works productions, Dr. Cerberus and The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial, as I wash dishes and do prep work in the kitchen.

What have you been reading?

The Tour de France knitalong begins Saturday morning and I don’t yet have a pattern picked out. I would like to make a shawl and I’d like to use a couple (or maybe three) of these shawl balls from Freia fine hand paints. They’re all in the Ombré Merino line: 430 yard-long, single ply balls. The colorways are (clockwise from top left) Hard Candy, Vamp, Aloha, and Melon.

I don’t yet have a pattern picked out. Here are a few I’m considering, but if you have any suggestions, please let me know: Frozen, Sea Shanty, Royal Mile, Parallelogram Scarf, Inara Wrap, and Sea Grass.

If it’s helpful, the shawl I wear the most is my Color Affection. I don’t love knitting feather and fan, so I’d rather not make a shawl that’s entirely comprised of that stitch, but I’m not against a section or two of it. I don’t know brioche, but it’s on my list of things to learn this year, so would be fine with a shawl that included that.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what other folks are reading and knitting.

The Relief Pitcher Throws A Sonnet
     ~E. Ethelbert Miller

You have to forget the last election.
The blown save.
What matters is now, not tomorrow, just now.
In every inning there is the possibility of something going wrong,
the way sunlight blinds or the way a ball skips towards
the wall or through and under a glove. You stand on the mound
of your imagination and imagine nothing except your own breath.
In your hands the roundness of the world.

How do you feel? Is this what you’ve always wanted?
It’s not about the score or getting out of the inning.
It’s about saving whatever needs to be saved. It can be nothing
more than one’s reputation or helping a child crave the memory
of magic and something to believe in. There is nothing more
human than baseball.

This is from Miller’s latest collection of poetry, If God Invented Baseball, which came out just as pitchers and catchers were reporting back in February. I’ve borrowed this copy from the library, but I will buy my own because it is a near perfect collection.

I know it’s summer, I know that means heat, I know no one wants to hear me complain. I will instead say that I am grateful for the ability to wear very little clothing, for air conditioning, and for the pool.

The weekend started out with a performances of Hamilton at the Kennedy Center. I enjoyed it quite a bit and thought the actors and dancers were excellent. The actor portraying the titular character is a better singer than Lin, so songs like “My Son,” were even better than the cast recording, and sad second-act events, while known to 80% of the audience, were portrayed so movingly, the cast had us all snuffling in our seats. We were fortunate to catch the tail end of the free Millennium Stage act before our show and emerged afterwards to a live karaoke battle.

Yesterday, I headed to the Families Belong Together rally and march, where 30,000 or so people braved the unrelenting heat to express our outrage about recent inhumane treatment of immigrant and refugee families. The organizers did a great job of having large portable toilets that would work for families and disabled protesters, lots of screens and speakers, and several banks of gigantic water dispensers. I also saw the one of the local fire trucks was using its hose to provide a misting area. (I admit at first I worried they were using it as a water cannon, but then I saw kids running toward it and decided that it was a friendly move.)

Afterwards, since I had not managed to meet up with my friends and since I was already on the Mall and gross, I decided to check out the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, an annual festival where they highlight the cultures of various places around the world. This year, the regions were the Catalonia region of Spain and Armenia. I ate a Catalonian lunch of fava bean salad and Crema Catalana, the Spanish answer to creme brulée, before heading off to see the crafts, speakers, and demonstrations. Because the heat had kept so many people at home, you were able to get up close to every booth and practically every kid I saw was getting a hands-on lesson from artisans ranging from glasswork to pottery. Usually the festival is ridiculously crowded, even in the heat, so that was a real treat.

By five, though, it was all I could do to drag myself to the bus stop and sit there eagerly awaiting the nap and shower I thought I was heading home to. And then I remembered the garden. And how it hadn’t been watered. And how no rain was expected. And how I’d want a drink if I were growing there. So I dragged myself down there (and then on to the grocery store, since it was only another two blocks) and it was good I went because things were definitely starting to look parched.

These are Catalonian torches used at the Summer Solstice to light bonfires. Every village has a unique design. The big ones are for adults and the small ones are for little kids. The dangling ones are meant to be swung in giant circles, kind of like when you swing a pail of water around.

Today, it was the farmers market and chores around the house and, later, an hour at the pool and then an hour at the park.

How was your weekend?