Three beautiful things from my past week:
1. The camera (and flashlight) on my phone started working again!
2. We landed in Baltimore at dawn and the sky was beautifully streaked with pink.
3. My BFF, Karen, and I got a chance to catch up.
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
We’re nearing the end of our trip to Salt Lake.
The celebration of life we held for Rudi’s mom on her 87th birthday was lovely. About 20 friends and colleagues were able to join us at a park pavilion for drinks, snacks, and reminiscences.
We scattered some of her ashes on Friday and we’ll do some tomorrow in areas where she used to forage mushrooms. It was clear that she approved of the first location, because we found two types without much effort.
While I’ve enjoyed swimming in the hotel pool and eating out, I’ll be glad to get home to Corey and volleyball, even if I will have to do some cleaning so a friend can come over this weekend.
Three beautiful things from my past week:
1. The volleyball team has worked on leveling up together, meaning nearly all of us are better than we were at the start of the season. We chased down balls we would have let drop, we blocked shots, and we made smart hits to beat a really solid team this week, moving us up into third in our league to end the regular season and making for a very merry gathering afterwards.
2. We arrived in Salt Lake this morning and while Rudi was getting his hair cut, I checked out a new-to-me tea house. The single-estate Assam tea from Kenya I tried was wonderful.
3. We saw A Strange Loop, a musical about a gay Black playwright struggling with his inner critics and his familial expectations, in New York City last weekend and found it deserving of every award it has won. The acting was outstanding, the lyrics moving and cheeky by turn, and the mostly minimal staging effective. I will need to read the libretto at some point, because there are seven people on stage nearly all the time and some of them singing over each other, which means I definitely didn’t catch everything that was going on.
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share finished series that we wish had more books. Here are mine:
(I was so crushed when I learned there’d only be four books.)
(I loved this series as a kid and would have read dozens more stories about the Tillerman family.)
(I believe there is now a collection of short stories about the other immortals that Scott originally published in an e-format.)
(I know they’d have to change the title of the series, but I want a book about their grandmother.)
How about you? Are there book series that you’d love for the author to write just one more story for?
Three beautiful things from my past week:
1. My friend Neal suggests that rather than do the sane thing, which is to pick up three additional players from the earlier round of volleyball games, we take on our opponents (who have ten players — enough for a full roster, plus four people ready to rotate in) with just the three of us who were able to make our match. I have my misgivings, but his confidence is contagious, and he, our teammate Chris, and I pull off a 2-0 victory.
2. Monday is a beautiful night for a ballgame and the Nationals must agree, because they decide to win the game.
3. Neal came over for supper and Ted Lasso, marking the first time we’ve had non-party company over in … five years. We agree that we’ll do it again, and I’ve already told my friend Anna and her partner that they should come sometime next month. And I just told Sarah to come for supper. How did I not notice this?
What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
My camera app has stopped working, and while this is annoying, it’s fine, as long as I find another app that does work before heading to New York on Friday. And I suppose even then it’ll be okay as long as Rudi or Eri take photos and share them with me.
In the meantime, let me share what I’ve been reading. I made some more progress with S.J. Bennett’s All the Queen’s Men on audio. I’d love to finish it tomorrow before we leave, so I can move onto my next audio option, but if I don’t, I’ll probably finish it on the train.
I did finish the first volume of Hikaru Nakamura’s Saint Young Men, a manga in which Jesus Christ and Buddha decide to take a year off after all the work at the millennium and spend a year living in a small apartment in Tokyo. It’s a thoughtful, but funny take on two divine immortals who also form a comedy act, have a blog, and have to live on a budget and not piss off their landlady. They have to deal with animals that want to sacrifice themselves when their cupboards are bare, celestial beings that would really like them to return home to heaven already, and inadvertently performing miracles, like Jesus accidentally turning the water at the bath house into wine because he found a pun funny. To help with in-jokes that aren’t obvious to an English-speaking audience, each of the 15 chapters is followed by an afterword with translations, context, and additional documentation.