Rudi heads to Salt Lake tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll join him Friday night. His mom suddenly moved into assisted living earlier this year, and he’s been working on getting her house emptied out so it can be sold. We’re hoping the next few weeks are the final push in this process, and I’ll go put in my work detail for a week. But before I do, I have a few things I need to wrap up here:

• Get through three more days of work (and the attendant to-do list there)
• Put the herbs Mum sent me home with into the ground and harvest anything ripe
• Get a flu shot
• Win a volleyball championship
• Get stuff back to the library
• Clean the apartment (didn’t happen before CT; looking less and less likely to happen before SLC)
• Make sure we have enough supplies for our cat sitter
• Do laundry
• Pack
• Get myself to the airport with enough time to catch my plane (should be super obvious, but it’s not)

I guess I’ve got my marching orders for the next few days…

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share our favorite bookish settings:

1. The beach (It’s not enough on it’s own to make me bring a book home, but it’s always enough to make me read the blurb.)
2. Christmastime (Ditto. And, actually, it’s usually enough to make me take the book out from the library.)
3. London (In pretty much any era.)
4. D.C. (Unless they do a terrible job of it. I stopped reading a book once because of the way they described the fountain in Dupont Circle.)
5. Victorian England (The setting of many of my favorite cozy detective series.)
6. New England (Again, unless they do a terrible job of it. I gave up on a book recently because she used a real Connecticut town in the entirely wrong part of the state.)
7. Autumn (Everyone’s just happier in fall.)
8. The 1920s (It always seems such a glamorous time…)
9. Modern Paris (I’m less interested in it as historic setting, but I’d be delighted to follow cat burglars up the Eiffel Tower or into the Louvre.)
10. The 1980s (Many of my school years were in this decade, which means I have a nostalgic fondness novels (particularly y.a./kidlit) sprinkled with banana clips and Trapper Keepers.)

How about you? What places or times immediately make you give a book a second look?

Ha!

I’m not sure where people get the idea that the country is so much quieter than the city.

There are two owls — one down my folks’ driveway and one somewhere further down the hill — chatting about potential meal options.

Something or maybe some things (Deer? A bear? Smaller nighttime critters trying to stay out of someone’s supper plans? The dog in the house up above sometimes hears it too. ) keep traveling through the brush uphill, stepping on downed branches and sending loose debris tumbling down the bank.

And that doesn’t take into account the crickets and peepers.

So, nope, not quiet here at all…

Again, I need to hit publish before ai turn off my phone…

It’s been a relaxing day. It’s not what I’d hoped for (may we soon retire the concept of “out of an abundance of caution”), but it was quiet and allowed me to take a pre-supper nap, spend time with my folks, knit, and stuff myself with pizza.

Tomorrow we’re goong to hunt down cider doughnuts. I can’t wait.

Rudi said, what happened to that post you typed in bed last night? Apparently I onlt hit publish in my mind…

We kicked off a long weekend by driving up to Connecticut to celebrate my dad’s birthday, our first in-person family birthday in 20 months.

Tomorrow, I’m goong to sleep in, but I also told my mom that we might need to find some cider doughnuts.

Sunday, Rudi is going for a bike ride, so it will just be my folks and me.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Rudi was finally able to fix my computer, which died a month ago. (It was a bad ribbon cable.) I’m so happy to have it back.

2. Rudi’s friend, Jay, has agreed to cat sit for us both while we’re away in Connecticut and while we’re in Utah.

3. I get to have drinks with my former colleague, who’s gotten her dream job and is moving across the country.

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