A Saturday night of reading is always made better by the addition of cats:

Corey heard a noise outside mid-snuggle. But it didn’t require more than a few seconds’ staring before he decided we were safe to start being lovey again.

Jer came out from sleeping with Rudi in the bedroom to lie under my reading lamp, and eventually I put down my knitting for the night and turned around to snuggle with him. While Corey is a chin lover, Jeremiah likes to nuzzle your nose and ears, which is often ticklish. (He’s gotten drooly in his old age, which now means you end up with very damp appendages and sometimes feel a bit like Hamlet’s father… but it’s love-filled drool, which does make it better.)

I’m eager to be heading to bed, so this will be a quick sketch of what I hope the weekend includes:

• Swimming at the pool.
• Finishing my sock. (I had to rip the toe back again. These socks are way more persnickety than the cat they’re named after.)
• Picking tomatoes and basil from my garden.
• Partaking of a festival.
• Watching a movie.
• Doing laundry.
• Making something with my plums. (I have yellow ones in a white colander and purple ones in a yellow bowl. If they weren’t a haven for fruit flies, they would be ideal counter decorations.)
• Heading to the shore.
• Painting my toenails.
• Dancing.
• Cleaning the kitchen.
• Enjoying a thunderstorm.

How about you? What are you hoping to do this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. One of the farmers at the market had lisianthus, which has to be one of my favorite cut flowers, so several stems came home with me.

2. The small, subterranean movie theater near me has cordoned off an outdoor seating area for pre- and post-show relaxation. With its wide overhang, it was the perfect place to sip an Italian soda while finishing my library book after it started raining when I was at the pool.

3. Thousands of people from every walk of life (young, old, Black, white, Latinx, Asian, Jewish, Christian, straight, queer, cis, transgender, dog lovers, guy with a parrot) in my city came together last weekend to say that we believed love could vanquish hate and that fear would not make us shut up and stay home.

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

I started reading Spinning Silver this week. It’s a reimagining of the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, set in Russia and featuring a young Jewish money lender, Miryem; her hired girl, Wanda; and deadly, otherworldly beings, who set her the impossible task of turning silver into gold. I loved author Naomi Novik’s earlier novel, Uprooted, and am finding the start to this novel has the same feeling as the beginning of that one. I’m hoping for good things.

On my phone I’m listening to a middle grade contemporary novel, See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng, and Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon for White America by local professor and minister Michael Eric Dyson. The latter is shaped as a church service and deals with being Black in contemporary America and what white people repeatedly fail to understand about that experience and need to learn.

The former is about a rocket-crazy young boy and his dog, Carl Sagan, who are recording sounds of the world on a Golden iPod in preparation for launching it into space to travel on the heels of Voyager’s Golden Record, put together by human astronomer Carl Sagan in 1977. In the process, he’ll learn what it means and takes to pursue the truth, both personal and universal.

I am still working on my shawl (I had a two-hour conference call to knit through today), but progress is slow and the color changes are slower and I’m impatient for it to be done. So of course, I put it down and picked up my Posey socks. As I was picking up a stitch that had dropped off the edge of the needle while stored in the bag, I noticed some loose stitches earlier in the toe. Since the toe is not one of those places where you can just let that go, I ripped back most of the way to where I’d started the grey yarn and will finish the toe in the morning. Self-striping sock yarn changes colors much more quickly than two gradient shawl balls, so I hope that keeps me moving forward much more quickly.

Should I finish my Posey socks, I’ll have to look at my other sock UFOs from Sock Madness to see which pair is furthest along and/or will take the least effort to finish. This year’s pair, Fee Dragée, may be a contender, since that’s halfway done. Or Slip Stripe Spiral, the pair I went out on two years ago, is already into the leg of the second sock, although I think I messed it up someplace and it’s waiting for me to figure out how to fix it. Or Rainbow Pipes, which was a Sock Madness pair from 4(!) years ago, which are complete except for i-cord that needs to be created for the cuffs and buttons that have to be (found and) sewn on. My oldest unfinished pair of socks is from nine years ago and is color work. One sock is completely done, but I’m betting my tension will be different than it was nearly a decade ago and that a needle adjustment will be necessary.

If you’d like to see what other folks are knitting and reading, head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

Rudi and I went to see Christopher Robin this evening. If you’re unfamiliar with the film’s premise, it’s about what happens to the human friend of Winnie the Pooh and the other residents of the Hundred Acre Wood after he leaves his childhood playing grounds for the final time.

In this live-action version, he puts aside his “childish” things, goes to boarding school, grows up, gets married, fights in the war, and has a child. When we zoom back into his life, Christopher, now played by Ewan McGregor, is the responsible and somewhat sorrowful head of efficiency for a struggling London luggage company. He’s been tasked with saving his colleagues’ jobs, which means he’ll need to skip the weekend holiday to the country with his wife, played by Hayley Atwell of Agent Carter fame, and seven-year-old daughter that the audience can see is just as necessary to save his family.

Cue Winnie the Pooh, who in seeking his old friend’s assistance, instead may be the only one who can help him reconnect with the boy he’d been and find a path through the lonely forest of adulthood he’d gotten lost in and companions to make the journey worth taking.

This was truly a joyful film to watch — a balm for the soul — although your heart will break several times along the way. The human characters were portrayed sympathetically (with the exception of Mark Gatiss’ character, who was just over the top jerky rich guy boss), the tone felt true to the literary source material, and the animation of the stuffed animals was excellent. The technology has come a long way in the past 20 years, to such a degree that it really didn’t feel animated in any way. You’ll find yourself staring at your own stuffed animals much more closely when you return home to see if they’ve actually been staring at you all this time, waiting for you to notice.

If Christopher Robin is playing anywhere near you, don’t act like a bear of very little brains, but get yourself to the theater immediately. You will not regret it.

With just over two weeks left in August, three weeks until Labor Day, and about five weeks until the autumnal equinox, it seems a good time to think about what I’d still like to do this summer:

• Get back to the beach again.
• See a few more movies outside.
• Swim at the pool twice a week until it closes for the season.
• Explore Teddy Roosevelt Island, the Arboretum, or the Aquatic Garden (since I’ve never been to any of them).
• Find a park where the trees are the right distance for hanging our hammock. Barring that, spread out a blanket and read all afternoon.
• Finish knitting a second pair of socks.
• Relax over strawberry daiquiris.
• Attend the National Book Festival and a few neighborhood festivals.
• Check out the two new ice cream shops that have opened nearby.
• Watch the dragon boat regatta.

How about you? What are you hoping to accomplish before summer comes to an end?