I saw my first inside Christmas tree on my bike ride Sunday. That just made me feel stressed. But seeing this, tonight, on my walk back from leaving some books at the Little Free Library in the park? Exactly what I needed…

Speaking of Christmas, I’m running the Virtual Advent Tour again this year. If you’ve already left me a comment saying you’d like to join in, awesome! I’ll be emailing you after I get back to D.C. next week with confirmation and dates. But there’s still lots of space for other folks to join in, so please do!

Because I got nothing else tonight:

1. Spending time with my family
2. Watching the Macy’s Day parade
3. Going on the breakfast run to Dunkin’ Donuts (I’m going to deliberately start using the old name now that they’ve announced they’re officially shortening it) with Dad
4. Singing along with “Alice’s Restaurant” (“You can get anything you want…”)
5. Piling on the side dishes
6. Eating pie (pumpkin and apple are the traditional flavors in our house)
7. Knowing I’ll get to see Karen in the days to come
8. Rooting for our respective football teams (although I only care about the Powder Puff game, and I think that’ll be done before we hit the road from D.C. this year)
9. Talking to loved ones who are far away
10. Kicking off the Christmas season

(I do not love the long drive, but it will be filled with audiobooks, podcasts, music, and an excellent traveling companion. But think of us when you head to bed on Wednesday night, because we’ll still be on the road.)

How about you? What do you enjoy about the holiday?

I intended to spend this afternoon bicycling over to the Deanwood, a neighborhood on the other side of the Anacostia that’s home to an award-winning branch library. I had an entire game plan that started with a pop-up Christmas shop across town, progressed to a once-a-week coffee shop at one of the rec centers, and stopped at the library. I was then going to come back home via the Kenilworth Aquatic Garden (where in the summer they apparently have amazing water lilies) and the new community coffee shop by Union Market. There were contingency options built in for not getting as early a start (skipping the pop-ups) and for not wanting to bike as far, including taking a bikeshare so I could leave the bike by the library if I didn’t want to keep cycling and take the metro home.

I reiterate, I had a plan.

It started out okay, although I left later than I’d hoped due to an uncalm stomach, so I ditched both pop-ups from my plan and decided to hit the Aquatic Garden en route to the library. It’s less than a ten-minute ride from one to the other and this way, I thought, I wouldn’t be riding in a less populated area as it got darker.

(I suggest you click through and mouse over the above shot on Flickr, because I’ve put in a note showing the Washington Monument, which is too small here to see.)

All this was true. It’s beautiful over there and it’s so secluded you’d never know you were in a city. I passed a few people on the trail, but not many, and I had an eye on the clock so I wouldn’t get to the library too late to explore.

Apparently, I was so busy taking in the scenery and the time that I missed my turn off the trail and back to civilization. When I did finally reach a turn, it was a little later than I’d expected, but not bad. However, it wasn’t the turn I’d wanted. Come to find out I’d overshot D.C. and was now out in Maryland.

(Not D.C.)

This is where things start to go off the rails. Consulting Google Maps, I asked it how I should best progress back to Deanwood. Back through the woods, it said. But it was nearly 4:30 at this point, and I was worried about being on the trail alone as it was seriously getting dark. So I nixed that idea and looked at the road signs. I was already on a fast-moving four-lane road, which although it had signs saying cyclists should take the lane, I wasn’t convinced the drivers of it were similarly inclined to agreement. And I was at an on-ramp to what looked like potentially to be a highway. I definitely didn’t want to take a highway! (I have accidentally done this at one point, coming out of National Airport and I do not ever want to repeat that terrifying experiment.) Possibly those roads would have been fine, but I decided to call Rudi and ask him to help find me a way home since he has more experience cycling in outlying areas.

He did find me a route that didn’t involve biking on highways or through dark woods, although it, too, was not without perils (mostly due to poor pedestrian signage and nonexistent warnings about dangerous sidewalk conditions on a stretch of road that I prefer not to bike on during the day, let alone at night (due to the high speed drivers like to take, not for it feeling otherwise dangerous)). By the time I reached home what was supposed to have been a manageable ride of a dozen miles turned into nearly double that and had me pedaling for nearly three hours straight. (Yesterday, I asked Rudi to come meet me because I didn’t want to add two miles to my ride.) The only thing that saved me was that I had taken one of the electric-assist bikes that was nearly fully charged when I borrowed it, but, still, that was a lot of energy expended. I will sleep well tonight.

But it was beautiful before it got stressful…

This is cheating a bit, because I completed these socks back in August, but I’m pretty sure I never showed you the finished socks. Today was my first time wearing them, August not being particularly conducive to sporting wool, so I thought I’d get a couple glamour shots from the park I visited (Chuck Brown Memorial/Langdon Park). Unfortunately, I didn’t remember I wanted to take pictures until the sun was already down (which does somewhat negate the purpose of waiting to model the socks until the clouds went away), so I was racing against the gloaming.

These were supposed to be my springtime socks, knit in time to model with the local azalea bloom season, but those plans didn’t come to flower.

The details:

The yarn is Knitterly Things Vesper Sock in merino in the In the Wildwood colorway. I knit my standard picot stockinette default for stripey socks, but used two needle sizes this time — 2.5 mm for the leg and 2.25 mm for the feet. I started them April 26th and finished August 12th.

Expect more shots of FOs in the next week!

Rudi and I headed to the Uptown, D.C.’s only old-fashioned single-screen movie theater still in existence, this evening for The Crimes of Grindelwald, which we enjoyed tremendously. I won’t share any details, except to say that all your favorite characters are back from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and that Jude Law does an excellent job as Dumbledore. We followed up the film with a late supper at a pan-Asian restaurant nearby, where they make a tremendous rainbow salad that I just adore. I also tried their rose black tea, which was very tasty, although I didn’t drink it fast enough for our waitress, who kept coming over to check on the water in the teapot.

I don’t have a lot else planned for this weekend, probably in part because all my days are weekends right now, which does remove some of the novelty and a lot of the urgency. If I get up early enough, there’s a new park opening near the center of the city with a dog parade planned to mark the occasion. There’s also a holiday pop-up shop that might be fun to take in. I also have a couple bike rides to libraries I’d like to get in, but if they get pushed off to the start of next week, it’s no loss. Mostly, though, I just want to get outside and soak up some of the predicted sunshine.

What do you hope to do this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A rainy stroll home includes several blocks (and a stop at the vet’s) with a woman walking two Staffordshire Terriers wearing matching rubber ducky raincoats (the dogs, not the woman).

2. A tiny infant strapped to a woman via a baby carrier is wearing a gigantic stripey hat with a bright pompom.

3. I stop at a biscuit restaurant (what? this is the south.) at teatime, where for a little while I’m the only customer. They have the music cranked and the young woman who waited on me at the counter is working on getting her coworkers to get down and dance to the ’80s funk playing over the speakers. They’re such a cheerful bunch that I leave in an excellent mood.

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