Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. One adventuresome duckling is reunited with its siblings and mama.

2. The new members of our volleyball team seem nice.

3. I forgot a bike lock, but really want to run into a shop. Some GW students watch it for me.

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

I’m feeling very meh about the book I started in print last week. There are some pretty major stressors in my life right now, so I can’t tell if it’s just that, if I need to give myself another 25 pages to let the story get going, or if, despite several other people telling me it’s good, it’s just not the right book for me.

And with all those other stressors, it feels very irksome to have the thing I like best as a stress reliever to be demanding additional brain power and attention.

Just be easy, reading, at least for the rest of this month!

Michael Sheen performs one of Dylan Thomas’ best-known poems. (“The man ain’t got no culture”)

I haven’t been especially good about reading this year, which is due in large part to working too much and being depressed and then working some more. But summer is a time of lounging by the pool and soaking up rays at the beach and staying out late at the park. I bet if I made dates with some of my friends to just go read at a cafe, they’d be down for that. So I will do that.

To help with that plan come That Artsy Reader Girl and this week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, a perennial seasonal favorite — the top ten books I plan to read this summer:

1. Incense and Sensibility by Sonali Dev — The latest in one of my favorite series — retellings of Jane Austen’s novels — drops the first week in July.
2. Beth & Amy by Virginia Kantra — The sequel to Meg & Jo, a modern reimagining of the four March sisters as 20-somethings who grew up on a farm in the Carolinas.
3. Pride & Premeditation by Tirzah Price — Yup, another Austen spin, but this time with a murder subplot.
4. The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary — I loved The Flatshare and road trips just scream summertime.
5. A Lady’s Formula for Love by Elizabeth Everett — A Victorian romance, but set between a fiercely independent scientist who heads a women’s intellectual circle and the bodyguard assigned to protect her. I’m hoping for a readalike to the Veronica Speedwell series.
6. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo — A heist novel, this is part of the Grishaverse and features some of the characters from the recent Shadows and Bone series on Netflix. I’d started it on audio months ago and then decided it would work better on paper and have been waiting for it on the holds list ever since.
7. The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina — Based on a true story, this novel tells about a telephone booth in a Japanese garden — and the unique purpose strangers put it to.
8. The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray — Historical fiction aboutBelle de Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian and a Black woman passing as white.
9. You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar — Real-life anecdotes from about Living While Black from Amber Ruffin and her sister.

How about you? What’s on your summer TBR list?

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Our weekend actually turned out pretty nice. Saturday, I caught up on sleep for the first half of the day. We spent five hours at our local watering hole with friends belatedly celebrating Rudi’s birthday and generally soaking up what turned out to be an ideal June evening. Oh, and I mostly finished my sock, too!

This morning I went to the farmers market and came home with strawberries and sweet cherries, among other things. I suspect there had been corn earlier in the morning, but I’m okay waiting until another day for that. I am hopeful for blueberries and raspberries sometime soon, though.

I spent a lot of time at the garden. All my plants (but not the beans) are in the ground. I harvested peas, herbs (you can see the basil on our supper capreses), strawberries, salad greens, my first cherry tomato of the season, and Swiss chard out of the main beds. Then, as I was planting the shallots in the potato patch, I discovered I had grown potatoes of actual size! I put them in around April 10, so we’re just around two months for a round trip from my kitchen and back! I’ve never done a midsummer harvest of potatoes, even though I know now is when I start finding new potatoes at the market. Some of them were tiny (once I’d severed their roots, there was really no going back), but some of them are of a saleable size! That’s about half a pint there — enough for a side dish!

I also got in a swim. I’m going to go do the dishes, take a shower, and then hit the hay. This week holds a baseball game, a movie, and a volleyball game if the weather finally cooperates again — and then maybe a trip to the beach on Saturday. I’m looking forward to it all.

I’m no closer to deciding what to knit for this year’s Tour de France knitalong than I was last year. But I promised to share some of the things I was thinking about, so, I thought I’d give you some of the 1-2 skein projects I’m looking at tonight and then share the 3+ skein projects later on. The links all go to Ravelry, should that be a helpful piece of information to you.

There are more here than I expected. And normally I would have Rudi help me filter them down and then bring them to you to help me decide. But he’s in bed and you’re always here (in a sense), so there we go.

First up is the XO Shawl. It’s knit with one skein of sock yarn and one of a silk mohair (both of which I should be able to wrangle out of my stash).

The Seladonia Shawl would give me the push to finally learn brioche

Either Winterberry, Crunch Time, or Orkidae Shawl would use two skeins of the same color. That gives me at least one option, but possibly just that.

Kingston Lacy could be knit in either fingering or lace, which gives me several options.

If I knit the Little Rainbow Shawl, I’d probably combine a solid with a gradient, rather than using mini skeins, which I don’t own.

Full Charged comes from the designer I knit my purple and pink 4-Ever in Blue Jeans shawl from two years ago.

Stonechurch is another mosaic design (colorwork done by slipping stitches, rather than knitting with two colors on the same row), which I seem to be attracted to a lot this past year.

Flowers in the Air is knit with a mohair blend and uses beads. The beaded socks I started knitting earlier this spring quickly went sideways, but I don’t really think that was the beads’ fault. Wispy Shawl doesn’t have any beads to complicate things.

Escanda uses just a single skein of sock yarn.

Hennes combines a solid and a variagated or self-striping skein.

What do you think? Do any of these catch your eye? Or, even better, have you made any of them yourself?