Bout of Books has wrapped up for 2021. I missed both Twitter chats, but I did finish the 500-page book I was reading, which was my main goal for the readathon.

I also listened to some of the Queen Elizabeth cozy I have out on audiobook and tackled a chapter of a graphic novel (The Runaway Princess by Johan Troïanowski) that’s due back to the library this week.

This is César “Papi” Castrillón, aka “Papi” Saicos, bassist and vocalist for Los Saicos, a Peruvian proto-punk band performing “Demolición,” one of the band’s biggest hits.

I’ve got no real plans this weekend, and I’m okay with that.

I wish you a relaxing weekend. I hope you get to enjoy it however you want.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I decide not to let a little rain keep me from going to the Fort Reno punk show. While I missed the first band, I arrived in time to catch a string sextet playing Brahms and a tribute band (for a Peruvian proto-punk group) featuring the septuagenarian bassist and singer of the original group performing the songs he made famous back in the mid-’60s.

2. I’m sitting in a lawn chair, when a short, fluffy puppy starts tearing around the park, eventually barreling straight toward me, putting the breaks on at the last minute, and then standing on its rear legs to tag my knees with its front paws. Later in the week, I am at a different park, sitting at a picnic table, when a small, elderly dog hops up on the bench and then climbs into my lap.

3. I buy a paper box full of tomatoes from a farmer at the market. Rudi has made (and frozen) sauce and soup so far and we still have about a third of the tomatoes left to finish.

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

Last week, I showed you that I’d gone astray with my knitting. Now you can see that I fixed it and am back on track. If I didn’t hate this slipped-stitch ribbing (I’m struggling with tension), I’d be further along, but we’ll take three rows of progress at a time over none.

I’m three quarters of the way through Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Aurora Burning, the middle book of their second snarky YA space trilogy, but fell asleep tonight instead of reading the final 150 pages. But I did listen to some of SJ Bennett’s The Windsor Knot, a mystery starring HRH Queen Elizabeth as a sleuth solving a murder at Windsor Castle, while I was out and about earlier, so all is not lost.

Rudi and I caught Free Guy at the movies tonight. If you haven’t seen the bazillion commercials, it’s about a sweet, generic video game character named Guy (played by Ryan Reynolds) who essentially lives the same day over and over again until one day when he crosses paths with the woman of his dreams. Guy is an NPC or non-player character (essentially a one-dimensional character who’s part of the background to the story), but after interacting with her, he changes. He starts doing good deeds in order to gain levels (she says she won’t talk to him until he levels up) and in the process draws a cult following for disrupting the normal gameplay and for playing by different rules. But because he doesn’t realize that he’s living in a shoot-em-up video game called Free City, he also doesn’t realize that the girl of his dreams is a woman in the real world (played by Jodie Comer), who, it turns out, is actually half of a pair of programmers who had created a video game, the code of which may have been included in Free City. She’s hunting for clues to help her in a lawsuit against the guy who stole the code.

A little bit Wreck-It Ralph, a little bit The Lego Movie, and a little bit The Truman Show, Free Guy is about daring to live your authentic life and breaking free of the parameters that have been placed on you. It was surprisingly sweet and I highly recommend it.