I’m feeling lazy and tired, so I thought I’d share what found its way into my market basket at the farmers market today:

• Milk and yogurt
• Granola
• Lemon pound cake
• Blueberries, queen Anne cherries, and currants
• Plums, peaches, nectarines, and peaches
• Corn on the cob
• Lettuce
• Summer squash
• Yu choy (an Asian green for stir-frying)
• A yellow heirloom tomato
• Three tiny cabbages (savoy, red, and pointed) — Rudi had an amazing key lime slaw at the brewery last night and I wanted to see if he could recreate it

What kind of produce is in season in your area right now?

It was a perfect day to spend at the beach. The air and water were both in the 70s. It was sunny, with very little breeze. There were enough waves to make the water fun, but not enough undertow to make it feel fraught.

The beach was already packed when we arrived, but folks start to disappear in the late afternoon. We discovered they were all hanging out on the boardwalk when we went up to buy our ice cream cones just as the sun was setting.

We found a new-to-us brewpub up the shore in Lewes. Rudi enjoyed a flight of beers, including a sour beer flavored with piña colada, and I had a fantastic grilled cheese with peach preserves. There were other things we wanted to try on the menu, so we’ll definitely be back.

It’s been another rough workweek, so Rudi asked if I wanted to spend tomorrow at the beach.

Um, YES!

I’ll see you on the other side of sea, surf, and sun!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The Bier Baron (formerly the Brickskeller, for those of you with a historic familiarity with D.C.) has reopened. It joins the Fireplace as the most local bars that shuttered completely during the pandemic to resume service in the past month. While I once would have been irritated to walk through the clouds of tobacco and pot smoke outside them both, at this point I greet their crowds like old friends (in my head).

2. My volleyball teammate, Katie, gave me a ride home after our game in rather plothering weather. As I’d biked down and had planned to metro home and I was soaked to the skin, it was a remarkably generous offer. And I was home in half the time either of the other modes of transit would have allowed.

3. A colleague offers me kind words when I need them most this week.

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

Apparently I thought I could knit with my eyes closed, because I fell asleep. Now I’m going to finish sleeping in my bed rather than writing you a better post.

I spent the entire night tonight lying on the couch, eating tortilla chips, playing phone games, and listening to an audiobook.

It’s that last bit that saves it, right? I mean, sure, it would absolutely have been better if I’d been knitting or cleaning or doing laundry while the book was playing, but at least listening to an audiobook while doing nothing else productive makes it not a complete waste of a perfectly good evening.

And it wasn’t. I wrapped up that audiobook in less than 24 hours, which has to have been a record for me. But in a year where reading has been slower than ever before, tearing through a book — any book — is such a relief.

It means somewhere under all this exhaustion and stress and depression and frustration, my core me is still there, waiting just to be sucked into a story at the expense of everything else.

And if it’s through my phone, rather than on paper, that’s cool, too, because reading is reading. And the page turning will come back, too.