I think I mentioned that I had taken the suggestion that several of you had to spend a portion of my birthday two weeks ago at the Library of Congress baseball exhibition. Pitchers and catchers had just reported for spring training, so it seemed a particularly apt time to go.

Keeping in mind that this is a library, rather than a hall of fame, I thought the curators did a nice job of pulling together materials that covered the highlights of the sport, from its highlights of bringing people together and lauding athletic prowess to its lowlights of cheating and discrimination.

There were mementos from the majors, from white baseball to the Negro Leagues to the women’s league that arose during WWII and that was memorialized in A League of Their Own, as well as collegiate ball, Little League, town and work teams, rec leagues, and international play.

There was interesting trivia. For instance, did you know that the first intercollegiate baseball game was held between Williams and Amherst Colleges in Massachusetts, but since there was concern this was over-emphasizing students’ physicality, they made it a double-header with a chess match?

Or that “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is about a woman fan? (Click through to Flickr to enlarge it so you can read the verses, rather than just the chorus we all know.)

They showed the ways in which equipment has evolved over time. The most startling definitely comes in the form of the glove. While the mitt of 1922 is largely recognizable today, I’m not sure if you showed the one from 1885 to a modern player that they’d try to field with it. (And even that was an improvement over the sport’s original barehanded technique.)

There were highlights from baseball films and on tv. They showed some of the memorable national anthem performances. And there was a selection of highlights from radio and tv broadcasters, which included Don Larson’s perfect World Series game (the ticket stub and program for which are below), the 1986 Mets, the 2004 Red Sox, the 2016 Cubs, and the interruption of the game to announce that Apollo 11 had landed safely on the moon.

My Mets got both some of our favorite and most painful memories included:

After I had moved on to the next case, one of the women behind me started singing “Meet the Mets,” much to the surprise of her friend, who didn’t know she’d grown up a fan of the team.

The hometown team got a shoutout from one of its Senators’ heroes, Walter Johnson, as well as Nationals Park providing the backdrop for the selfie station.

Obviously, I had a blast. If you’re in town (or can get here) before the exhibit closes in late July, I really hope you get a chance to see it. If you won’t be, they’ve put out an accompanying book, which is widely available and which your library might have.

This weekend included:

• A talk by an artist
• Knitting outside over hot chocolate
• Enjoying all the winter/sprint flowers

• Fewer chores than there should have been
• A lot more streaming tv than necessary (I discovered one of the libraries I belong to lets you borrow Acorn memberships!)
• Not flooding
• Cuddling Corey

• A very large (and delicious) salad
• A bagful of produce from the farmers market (including ingredients for cottage pie)

• Reading on Book Hill
• Enjoying zataar fries before the sun set

• Chatting with my folks
• Welcoming Rudi home

How was your weekend?

When I lost my job in November, the thing that hurt most was the loss of an above-ground window safely away from plant-loving cats. (There were several other things that came in a close second, but honestly that sixth-floor windowsill had always been one of the things that had kept me at that job.)

I cleared off the top of my pie chest as a place safe from the cats and tucked my plants (three pots of African violets and two of orchids, plus a jade plant) in amongst the knitting needles, but while it fixed one of my problems, it did not fix the major one: there is no sunlight in my apartment, not even indirectly.

I’ve shifted my Ott light over to sit in between the plants, but it’s a flip lamp and requires my remembering to turn open it up, which does not happen every day. And it can only illuminate two of the plants at a time and then I have to turn it, so it’s an inadequate stop-gap, at best.

So I’ve been on the hunt for a better solution. I think it will involve another couple lamps up there, honestly, which isn’t great, because it requires running an extension cord over there, but I’ll make it work. Right now, I’m leaning toward desktop-type lamps with grow light bulbs in them, but if anyone else has suggestions that work for them, I’d love to hear them.

I took my plants down today to water them and the bigger of my two orchids is clearly suffering. I hadn’t worried overly much when the bottom leaf started losing color; that’s what happens periodically. But today I noticed two more are also rapidly turning color, so my casual search for a solution has become vastly more acute. While I wouldn’t want to lose the violets, the orchids were a birthday gift from my favorite uncle, who died several years ago, and keeping them alive is important to me. I need to come up with a solution this week in order to avoid inflicting any more damage on this delicate plant.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know. And I’ll keep you all posted on what I decide and how the interior garden fares.

Spring seems to be just around the corner, according to some of what I noticed while walking around my neighborhood today:

Three beautiful things from the week after my birthday:

1. I headed up to Politics and Prose on Monday for the American launch of Jasper Fforde’s new book, Early Riser. He was hilarious, as always, warning us that while all his previous books had taken approximately 120 days to write this one had taken 600. “Unfortunately, it is not six times better than my previous books.”

2. Rudi learned Sunday night that he’d been honored at his bicycle club’s annual meeting (which he’d had to miss because of his ski coaching obligations) with the Peter LeGrand Good Shepherd Award for being an outstanding ride leader. Apparently he was nominated by 14 members of the club for his weekly spring/summer ride and for being both fair and “a hardass.” (He leads a popular multi-level ride through northwest D.C. and nearby Maryland during the tail end of the evening rush hour, so he sets and enforces really strict rules about how participants should behave on the road.)

3. I was so caught up in the daffodil watch that I didn’t notice we’d had some other bulbs bloom in the neighborhood this week. (Heading to Georgetown this weekend to check out Book Hill…)

And a bonus, just because:

4. My (belated) birthday cake turned out great (I added a drop of food coloring to the filling to make it pink to play up the Valentine’s connection):

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

I think it was very nice of Jasper Fforde to publish a book to match my shawl-in-progress. I suspect I will be done with the book first, because I am nearly certain I have enough yarn to eke out a seventh strip so am going to go for it.

I am also reading this graphic novel adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, done by Mariah Marsden and Brenna Thummler. The illustrations are amusing and they manage to include most of the phrases we all love, but it’s missing the flavor of the original text. But it also moves really quickly. I only started it last night, but am already to the scene where they jump on Aunt Josephine.

I’m down to the last 45 minutes of The Woman Who Smashed Codes. World War II is over and William and Elizebeth are trying to figure out how to proceed with their lives during peacetime. He doesn’t die until 1969, so they’ve got some time to enjoy each other’s company. I hope they’re able to do that…

Head to As Kat Knits to see what else folks are reading and crafting.