Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The times you most appreciate renting, rather than owning, property is when there is a dead, bloated ROUS outside your window and someone has to remove it so it stops stinking up your living space.

2. Sunday was March 14 (aka Pi Day in the U.S.; places who write their dates with the month second observe it on July 22). We were feeling down after our friend’s death, so we pushed our celebration off by 24 hours, and I capped a day off by baking broccoli-cheese quiche and apple crisp. They were both quite tasty.

3. The extra hour of daylight every evening is absolutely worth misplacing an hour of sleep until fall.

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

So … Sock Madness 2021 … We can now officially chalk it up as the year I wasn’t paying attention.

See how we have two flowers next to each other?

We should not. They should be set off from one another, by half, so that they alternate down the leg like garden stepping stones, rather than like the rectangles of a hopscotch board. I just absolutely read the pattern wrong, which is a little irksome because I thought to myself that if I’d been designing this pattern I would have alternated them … exactly the way the designer did … rather than spacing the flower rows out by a couple dozen twisted rib rows.

It’s fine. I had already missed a smock on the other side, which would have eliminated me from competition anyway. But now I am left with the decision of what to do with the sock. Obviously it would be silly to keep knitting it the way I thought the pattern had been written, since I already didn’t think it should be done that way. I could rip it back to the start of the first flower and knit it right. In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t gone far past it, but I do not love twisted stitches and would prefer not to redo a couple dozen rows. I could decide I’m doing a variation, with a row of flowers at the top, not dissimilar from a band of colorwork and then just alternate from the nearest spot it makes sense to begin down the leg, which could look a little wonky with flowers that close together vertically, but also might look fine. I could come up with some other sort of variation that stops the twisted stitches once I get to the foot. Or, I could rip back to the cuff, which is pretty and not so many twisted stitches I would resent having to replicate them on a second sock and knit some other pattern down the leg. Thoughts? Other ideas?

I started Ring the Hill tonight and have not gotten very far, because I’m having to stop myself from wanting to tweet out/highlight gems of quotes every couple paragraphs. I’m in a bit of a reading funk, so finding something where I like the language is helpful, but not really for finishing a book quickly. I’m also still listening to The Midnight Library, but it’s also not hooked me so much that I want to listen nonstop.

If you want to see what others are knitting and reading, head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

Last week, Japanese Breakfast, which is the stage name of Michelle Zauner, just kept popping up on my radar. Sometimes that happens for a reason. The Grammy Awards were coming up and maybe she was nominated for something. But she wasn’t. So then I knew it was just the universe trying to tell me to look into it. I try not to ignore the universe, because the universe doesn’t like being ignored and tends to have nasty ways of upping the ante. No, I don’t know what the escalation would have been for not following up on a band named after a meal, and I don’t think I want to. Do you?

Anyway, the universe was right and the video that was out for her (their?) single, “Be Sweet,” was campy ’80s fun. I thought I’d share it with you here, because clearly that’s what the universe wants to have happen. It’s like a chain letter, but cosmic.

Apparently, she performed this song on Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, but I think the video makes the song. But I’m sure she was also good live.

The seasonal Top Ten Tuesday lists at That Artsy Reader Girl tend to be among my favorites, partly because they just require I give you a list of the books I’m looking forward to reading the most over the next three months. Easy!

Here are ten I’m hoping to get to this spring:

1. Let’s start easy. These are my two most recent purchases: Reynard the Fox by Anna Louise Avery
2. Ring the Hill by Tom Cox
3. Adding to my British animal theme, Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit was a Christmas gift. Plus, I will always read everything he writes, even if I don’t always love it.
4. I haven’t yet picked up Murder on Cold Street, the latest in my favorite mystery series by Sherry Thomas, because they only had one copy at the bookstore at Christmas and it was a gift. The library across the river has a print copy, so I’ve requested they put it on hold for me.
5. An Unexpected Peril by Deanna Raybourn only came out at the beginning of this month. I’ve added it to my library holds list, as well.
6. The final book in Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters trilogy, Act Your Age, Evie Brown!, also just came out.
7. Gish Jen’s The Resisters, a baseball meets sci fi dystopia novel.
8. I heard about Serena Singh Flips the Script by Sonya Lalli during a local bookstore’s Galentine’s Day event, plus it’s set here in D.C.!
9. Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse was one of the Alex Award Winners, a category of adult fiction which tends to appeal to young adults.
10. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

What are you hoping to read this spring?

I spent several hours down at the garden this afternoon. I raked everything out, pulled aside the straw-like bunching onion stalks to discourage the slugs from eating my strawberries (I assume it will have no effect on the rabbits), marked off the boundaries of the beds, and turned over the soil in the main section.

The sorrel is back (that’s what’s in the front center of that section) and there are still several clumps of onion. The soil is healthy — lots of worms — but I should add some more one of these years, since my plot is sunken compared to the pathway (and therefore prone to ending up with the wood mulch in it).

Several years back, I planted bulbs along the back fence. The mini daffodils (they’re normal-sized heads, but have stems that are like three inches tall) have been the most successful of those, although I also saw shoots for at least one crocus and some tulips.

The mint and rosemary are doing fine. I suspect the lemon balm is also fine; I dumped a bunch of tomato cages on it, but it’s ridiculously hardy. I noticed the purple sage I planted last fall had some leaves on it in the potato patch, so I’ll need to be careful when I put in the potatoes that have gone to seed in my kitchen.

I’m down to only one or two strawberry plants in the right section of the garden, so that will be a top priority in the near future. My peony survived, though, and is looking very cheerful.

And a single, adorable leek overwintered. I’ll be saving it for a special dish.

In addition to tracking down strawberry plants (they were virtually impossible to find last year) and planting the past-prime potatoes, getting peas and early greens into the ground are next on my priority list.

Being outside and working in the sun was helpful toward channeling my grief at Jerry’s death into something productive. He and Dan also appreciated gardening and had a very nice collection of plants on their top floor terrace.

• Today was not the best day.
• I do not feel like writing paragraphs or stringing thoughts together like Mardi Gras beads, so you’re getting bullets, which, come to think of it, also look like Mardi Gras beads strung together.
• As Rudi was loading the car at 6 a.m. this morning for his winter weekend drive to Pennsylvania for ski coaching he heard a ping. He told me this as he kissed me goodbye “just so you know.” I thought I might not sleep again this morning because now I knew.
• Five minutes later he was back again. One of the tie rods had snapped, which is a far better thing to happen when a car is parked than when you are driving it on the highway at dawn (or any other hour).
• We rented him a car so he could get to his final weekend of coaching for the season.
• When my car broke a couple years back (also on a coaching weekend), it had the decency to still be drivable.
• A baseball games-and-Christmas party friend has cancer. We didn’t find out about it until partway through the pandemic. It was not a good diagnosis. His husband started posting pictures of better days yesterday. This morning he shared that he’s brought our friend home, along with round-the-clock care.
• I spent a lot of today crying.
• It sucks to say goodbye through a comment on a website.
• I also spent a lot of today napping instead of planting peas or sitting out in the sun.
• I watched a Miss Marple episode tonight. Terrible things happen in Agatha Christie novels, but the villain very nearly always gets his or hers in the end.
• I do not know who the villain is in this current story arc of my life — a virus? mutating cells? aging auto parts? — but I hope they get theirs soon.
• My sock-in-progress also sat next to me and watched tv. It didn’t have to put any effort into growing, because I didn’t pick it up.
• I will not advance past this round of Sock Madness and I am okay with that.
• I did start my spring training book, while sitting in the park. The first chapter is about an elderly couple whose home was squatted in while they were away over the winter.
• I bought daffodils at Trader Joe’s earlier. I should probably put them in water. The store doesn’t keep them in water, so I’m not feeling overly urgent about it. But I can’t admire them if they’re sitting in the dish drain, rather than in a vase.
• The drawback of napping all day is that I’m awake. Also, I lost an hour a little while ago, so while the clock currently says 4 a.m., I am taking solace that it would only have been three at this time yesterday.
• The sun will set at 7:14 tonight, which means it won’t really get dark until 8. And that’s a thing to celebrate.