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.