April has arrived, as has its first weekend. It’s supposed to be comfortable and dry, if not actually sunny. Here’s what I’m hoping it includes:

• Try my hand at macarons. I made them once several years ago and they were not my biggest success. Over Christmas and my birthday, Mum got me set up with a pan, fun food coloring, and a cookbook, which I’ve now perused. Keep your fingers crossed they turn out less … flat … than last time!
• Check on my garden. Maybe I’ll have to put in supports for the peas!!!
• See Shazam!
• Head to Virginia for a library book sale.
• Put together a bag for Goodwill. Volleyball shirts keep falling on my head every time I open my closet door, which means it’s time to send some of them away.
• Visit a friend. His home remodeling is complete and he’s invited folks to stop by to check it out.
• Finish my book.
• Listen to some baseball.
• Reorganize our hallway closet. We need to empty out the car and reshuffle our seasonal items (no more need to have my ice skates accessible, but the portable hammock might be a plus!), both of which means taking a look at what is actually taking up space in our non-clothes closet. I’m hoping there’s an untapped air pocket in there. (That is actually possible, since I used to have a gigantic clothing bag in there that’s no longer being used.)
• Enjoy the cherry blossoms and maybe the fireworks celebrating them.
• Send out some birthday cards. (This also means figuring out where my stamps are hiding, since I don’t want to have to keep using my Snowy Day stamps now that it’s spring!)
• Eat pizza.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. There is a mini golf course at Hains Point — the oldest continually operating miniature golf course in the U.S., dating back to 1931 — that Rudi and I had never tried before. As we biked around looking at the cherry blossoms, we noticed it was not especially crowded, so we paused in our perusal to putt a round. We played 21 holes, because there was a family with small children ahead of us that we caught up to on the final hole, so we told them to take their time, since no one was behind us. The other benefit of there being no one behind us was that it allowed me to play my favorite version of mini golf, which often involves my ball gaining some altitude and speed and which is decidedly less safe and fun to play when others are around. Rudi was impressed when I sent a ball careening off the course and then, instead of taking the penalty shot and dropping it back onto the green, I chipped it back on. (I had to eventually take the penalty shot for the one that ripped into the (deserted) picnic area, because the curb to get back onto the hole was higher there.)

2. A friend emailed with very exciting news.

3. We got to our first baseball game of the season on Saturday, a gorgeous bluebird of a day, with a slight breeze off the river and temperatures in the 70s. The Mets got on the board early with three runs in the top of the first inning and kept adding to their total, but the Nationals regularly nibbled away at their lead, keeping the game interesting to us until the final out in the bottom of the ninth guaranteed the Mets their surprisingly fraught victory.

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

I picked up a new book at the library earlier this week — Deanna Raybourn’s A Dangerous Collaboration, the latest in the Veronica Speedwell mystery series. Set in Victorian England, the series is a gender bending homage to Sherlock Holmes, although Speedwell’s Holmes is far more equaled by Stoker’s Watson than is usually the case. This addition to the series is set on an island off the Cornish coast and features a castle with a poison garden. I’m sure we can all see where this is going to go. And I’m excited for it to do so.

I’ve been in a reading slump recently, so the area around our couch is currently littered with books that I’ve dipped into, expressed interest in continuing, and then put aside for something new, which also fails to snare my attention fully. Less than 24 hours after starting this book, though, and I’m past the treacherous waters of the 50-page mark, so I’m hopeful.

I have also been carrying on with Ladee Hubbard’s The Talented Ribkins and Questlove’s Creative Quest on audio. I’m narrowing in on the halfway mark for the former, which remains both interesting and vague, as our septuagenarian narrator is slow to reveal important details from the past to his niece and his readers. The latter audiobook is fine, and Questlove just revealed the importance of the Stevie Wonder episode of The Cosby Show to many of our now middle-aged hip hop pioneers.

I did not get caught between sock #1 and sock #2 for my stripey stockinette pair. This is the first second sock of 2019, so it’s a pretty momentous knitting occasion for me. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to carry on quickly through. And I just have the toe of the first of my Smock Madness sock to finish before moving on to the second one of that pair, as well. Progress on my shawl has stalled, but it has been suggested to me that if I complete some major item on my to-do list that that feeling of accomplishment might carry me through some of the other tasks, so I may put some energy into wrapping it up. Plus, we’re getting into the weather where I can start going out with just a tshirt and shawl into the evening, so this would be a perfect time to get it off the needles and onto my shoulders.

Want to see what other people are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits.

I happened to have an event I was heading to yesterday evening down at the Wharf, which is right across the harbor from Hains Point. I’d hoped to check out some of the cherry blossoms, dock my bikeshare, and then take the jitney across, but there were no docks to be had, so I had to forego my admiring of flowers in order to keep biking to my end destination.

But before I did, I thought to take a couple of photos from the date deemed this spring’s Peak Bloom:

We had some rain this evening or I would have gone back then. I may try again tomorrow afternoon or may wait and go on Thursday instead. It should still look lovely through the end of the week, when there will start to be more petals on the ground than on the trees and when the leaves start taking center stage on the cherry trees.

I’ve heard the Arboretum’s cherry tree collection is quite lovely and they’ve really been pushing it this year to the locals as a less-crowded, longer-lived alternative to the Tidal Basin area. I may bike over there one day, particularly since I’ve never been, or I may wait until next month when their azaleas are apparently something to be marveled at.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us about the things that automatically make us want to read a book. I rarely will buy a book based just on these things (with a couple exceptions), but mostly these are things that will get them added to my TBR list or maybe my library request queue:

1. Written by favorite authors: Pretty much if J.K. Rowling, Barbara Kingsolver, Jasper Fforde, or Rainbow Rowell write a book, I will buy it with no further recommendation needed.
2. Heists. I love heists on the screen and on the page.
3. Set in places I’ve lived or places I’ve visited. With the latter, it’s because being able to picture a place intimately is a huge plus. With the former, it’s both because I love to see these couple places represented well and also a little bit because I want to catch an author out in what they’ve gotten wrong. I’ve put down books set in my D.C. neighborhood because they described the Dupont Circle fountain incorrectly or because they referred to M Street in Georgetown as being townhouses. (Rudi and I have mulled whether I could generously give this one to the author, and I have not given up the idea of returning to it, particularly as I bought my copy of the book and had it inscribed by the author.)
4. Epistolary novels. I love me some letter writers.
5. Found families. I love it when a disparate group of individuals comes together to take care of each other.
6. A personal recommendation from someone whose book opinions I tend to agree with: My folks are usually pretty good with what they recommend to me. My best friend, Karen, although we’ve both had some notable misses. My friend Amani, who early in our friendship let me tag along with her to a bookstore only to remark later that I was the first person who didn’t make her feel rushed in her favorite sections. Raidergirl3, because I think we value a lot of the same things in the books we like.
7. Feminism. I like strong women, or women who become strong through the course of the story.
8. Retellings — of fairy tales or classic stories. Updated takes. A change in point of view. Sherlock Holmes stories tend to particularly suck me in. And Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series falls a bit into this through the Bookworld bits.
9. Children’s stories in translation. They sometimes take me a while and oh my god I hated Bronze and Sunflower, but I always like to give them a shot.
10. Authors as main characters. Either featuring fictional authors, or fictionalizing real authors (such as Stephanie Barron’s series of mysteries with Jane Austen as the protagonist).

How about you? What automatically makes you want to read a book?

I really thought last week’s garden update would be my final one for the month, but the difference a single week makes is so singular, I had to show you!

My peas:

My spring onions are carrying on:

My daffodils, which contrary to my previous report are mini daffs and which have since grown to a normal height:

My crocus is a gorgeous stripey one:

My violets are still being a little shy, but I expect they’ll have found their confidence by next weekend. I transplanted a bunch more from the front of the garden to the back.

Today, I planted a bunch of seeds — chard and arugula and lettuce and the like. I didn’t have any spinach seeds to plant with me and I need to go through my master garden bag to see if they’ve gotten separated from their seasonal brethren or if I need to acquire a new packet.

Next week, I need to rake out the strawberry patch and dig out the back of the garden, where I usually plant herbs and a pepper or two. I moved our mint over, because we’re going to lay piping around the garden to help transport water and the spigot is in my plot. Our garden manager thinks I’ll be able to reclaim that territory once the piping is down, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry.