Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Wednesday was a gorgeously warm day, so I spent a good portion of the afternoon and evening outside. As I was talking with my mom on the phone, I caught the reflection of the sunset and moved to get a better angle. Wow!

2. Usually dinners when Rudi is away are a pretty hit-or-miss affair. Sometimes leftovers, sometimes bowls of cereal, and occasionally something easy I can cobble together on my own. Last Sunday’s fell into the latter category, but was a fresh baguette, microwavable fondue we bought earlier in the winter for just this occasion, and a glass (in a real wine glass!) of sparkling cider that’s been sitting unopened in the fridge for months.

3. Mulch is one of those scents, like fallen ginkgo fruit, that is mostly unpleasant. But it’s also so specifically of a moment in time that when I smell it, I’m immediately moved. Workers have been redoing beds all over the region this week in the lead-up to the warmer weather and cherry blossom crowds, and it’s hard to walk for far without the pointed odor of worked tree and planter boxes and front landscaping poking your brain and reminding you that spring is here.

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

So far, I have only read one of the books on my winter TBR list, despite the fact that I finished my 14th book of the year yesterday. I do not think I can read the other nine before spring arrives on Thursday, but I may sneak one more in. (I pulled several of them out so they’re in front of me to aid in that process.)

But, that said, I’m still going to make a list for spring that maybe I’ll ignore and maybe I’ll get to. But either way, what is a TBR list for but to strive to get to everything we want to read someday? Who’s to say it won’t be the coming season?

Here are ten of the books I hope to read before summer’s arrival, some of which I own and some of which will be library borrows:

1. Linda Holmes’ Back After This
2. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
3. Grace Lin’s The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon
4. Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey
5. A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal
6. The Stargazers by Harriet Evans
7. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
8. Rainbow Rowell’s Slow Dance
9. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
10. Mastering the Art of French Murder by Colleen Cambridge

What’s on your seasonal reading plan for the next few months? Lighter, fluffier fare to fit into the smaller moments between being out and about? Or now that the weather is getting warmer, are you feeling like you can tackle some weightier tomes?

You can see what else folks have queued up at That Artsy Reader Girl.

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Saturday was too windy to play volleyball outside, but that meant I had time to check out a new-to-me bakery (excellent croissant, mediocre chai) and have Rachel come over for a cuppa and to pick up the tea she had included with our annual order.

2. This week’s floral bounty included the magnolias and the first hyacinths.

3. This week’s lunar eclipse was kind of a dud with low clouds appearing just at totality, but there were some lovely sunsets to make up for it.

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

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Daffodils and croci are finally starting to pop here. It’s about a month later than I’ve seen daffs in recent years, but probably closer to when we should see them.

2. I headed down to the Mall on Friday evening to catch the Great Planetary Alignment. It was very cool, and I’m grateful to the stargazing app I have, which mostly helped me identify what I was seeing. (If you click through to Flickr, you can enlarge the photo to see the sliver of moon just on the horizon, as well as Mercury and Venus, I think. Jupiter and Mars are further up in the sky, out of shot, and Saturn had already set. Neptune and Saturn required magnification, which I didn’t have.)

3. John and Rebecca and I went out for Vietnamese food after volleyball on Saturday. The day had been sunny, but with a strong, steady breeze that sometimes pushed the ball yards away from its original trajectory and sent lightweight items (like the empty stake bag) flying for a block before I caught up with them. So a warm meal was especially welcome.