Saturday started with sleeping in, which I needed, but which also ate into my time outside. This is why it’s helpful to have a backyard or a beach. You can throw on a bare minimum of clothing and go back to sleep outdoors. But I did eventually get myself out and down to the garden, where my harvest included two sweet potatoes, most of the rest of this year’s basil, two types of sorrel, and several tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos,

I met up with Rudi and we took ourselves up to Petworth, to one of our local bookshops, which was having a sale. I bought the short story collection Black Boy Joy and a collection of poems written on bus commutes. After stopping by the house to feed the cat and drop off the car, we took ourselves out to Art All Night, the annual celebration of late-night art. We visited an embassy and an art space in our neighborhood and then metro’ed downtown to the park by my old office, which has been rehabbed for the past year. They’ve done a beautiful job of updating the space, and if they can find a way to let the homeless use it unimpeded, I’ll be totally pleased with their work. We ate some jollof rice from a Nigerian food truck, enjoyed some music, and then took ourselves off to the library.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library is our main library and reopened during the pandemic after a major renovation to the Mies Van der Rohe building. And after a public dedication during normal business hours, they opened it up for alternative programming for the festival, with juggling, community performances, a Black art pop-up, a film screening, and an outdoor hip hop show by Black Alley.

Today was chiller, with a trip to the farmers market and later to a farm, where I picked apples, and the Tonys concert. Overall, a good weekend, but over too soon.

How was yours?

As of today, the sun is setting at 7 here in D.C. I haven’t wrapped up work before that time all week, so I’m going to have to be very intentional starting this week to shut the computer at the time I’m supposed to, not at the time the work is actually done. (Because, to be honest, the work is never actually done.)

The weather is now pleasant enough to want to be out during daylight hours, so I’m going to need to get up earlier and try to get a walk or cup of tea in the park in before my workday begins. And then I’m going to need to scurry out to the garden or to the towpath for a bike ride or to the only cafe with evening hours on this side of town after it’s supposed to end. Because if I go straight through my favorite season without ever seeing the sun on weekdays, it’s going to be a huge problem.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We caught a sneak preview of Dear Evan Hansen this week. While we haven’t seen the stage show, Rudi and I thought the movie was really well done.

2. I manage to organize some of our volleyball team into getting together for drinks before our doubleheader.

3. The Q Street Barbie Pond has a 9 to 5 theme going on. (I’d suggest you click through the above photo so you can zoom in on Flickr.)

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

I have one and a half more mosaic charts left to knit and then I return to the wasteland of ribbing and an icord bindoff. It’s possible I’ll finish the shawl in the next month, which would be great, because I’m over knitting it.

Jared Reck’s Donuts and Other Proclamations of Love has had a slower start than I would have hoped, since who doesn’t love the idea of a doughnut and kebab sandwich food truck? I also wanted a little space from the audiobook I started last week, so I decided to pick up a long-neglected listen, Michelle Obama’s Becoming. We just reached the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which is when most of us first became aware of her husband.

Head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup of reads and crafts.

I discovered a pull in my knitting tonight. It was on the wrong side, so conceivably I could have just stretched the fabric a little bit and then woven it under the stitches.

But instead I picked at the stitches with a spare needle, teasing the elongated loop in both directions until all the slack was gone.

It took more than an hour to accomplish, but I’m glad I took the time.

There’s a lesson there to apply to real life, where taking the time to relieve tiny increments of a major stressor eventually lead to the problem being solved. But that takes time and patience, and I really just want to weave in the threads and disguise the things that could take down the entire thing.