Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Playing with kids in my new volunteer gig.

2. The first outdoor concert of the season, followed in short order by the first bar (patio) concert since COVID began.

3. Strawberries in our yogurt. Risotto with fiddleheads. A salad with pea shoots, garlic chives, and asparagus. Stir fry with pak choy from the garden

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

It occurred to me suddenly last week that this coming Sunday was Sheep and Wool and that if I wanted to debut something new (weather-pending), I’d need to get a move on finishing a piece. So I’ve pulled out Fully Charged, my Tour de France 2021 shawl, to see if I can finish it. Technically, I could do the border rows now, but I still have yarn and, frankly, the shawl seems a little small at the moment. So I’m just continuing on with the stripey section until one of the balls gets small enough for me to start feeling worried.

I have not yet started Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, but I’d better get started because it’s 600 pages and due back in less than two weeks. It’s in my knitting bag for tomorrow.

Visit As Kat Knits for this week’s reading and crafting roundup.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share one-word reviews of the last ten books we read. I’m going to mix it up slightly and give you the one word I currently most associate with each of the last ten I’ve started (feel free to ask in the comments if you want more detail):

1. Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim: Adjectives (in progress)
2. Saint Young Men by Hikaru Nakamura: Deities (in progress)
3. The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes by Leonard Goldberg: Spin-off
4. Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny: Waiting (in progress)
5. Yours Cruelly, Elvira by Cassandra Peterson: Celebrities
6. The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin: Tearful
7. Shelf Respect by Annie Austen: Bibliophilia
8. A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske: Magic
9. Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki: Doomed
10. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto: Family (in progress)

How about you? What is the word you’d most associate with a book you’re reading or recently finished?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Daytime baseball

2. Azaleas in bloom

3. A trip to the beach that coincides with a bonfire and marshmallow roast.

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

Look! Different knitting and different reading!

The knitting is Mum’s (2021) Christmas gift, Campfire Cozy, which I picked up again toward the end of last week. I have eight more rows of the textured stitches to get through and then it becomes mindless tv knitting. I’m hopeful I’ll be able to hand the shawl over sometime before Christmas 2022.

I put Fools in Love back into the rotation because it’s overdue to the library and I forgot to put it in my bag last week when I went to Virginia. I took that as a sign I was meant to finish this collection of YA romance short stories after all. I also started Saint Young Men, a collection of comics translated from Japanese about religious figures Jesus and Buddha rooming together as young men during a gap year in Tokyo in the early aughts. It’s less sacrilegious than it sounds, but also maybe less funny than I’d hoped it would be. I’ve also started a new audiobook, Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim. I’m not yet sure if I’ll keep going with it. It probably depends on how many more times she describes food with multiple adjectives.

Want to see what others are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

The garden has responded well to the recent spate of rain showers, growing lush and popping seedlings out in a reassuring manner. But it’s also been warm, which has led many of my cold-weather greens, including my two kale plants and all the bok choy, to bolt. ‘T’is the season.

My flowers are doing well. Rudi asked if we could plant some petunias, which remind him of his grandmother, so of course I said yes. Two of the pink ones appear above alongside the yellow pansies that overwintered and my beloved violets.

My seeds have sprouted, although I’m not fully sure which of them have grown so boldly. I think one is pak choi, one might be arugula, and one might be a lettuce, but I won’t swear to any of it at this point.

My Swiss chard, despite having been my first sprouts, have been slow to grow, and while some peas are knee-high, fewer of them have emerged than I’d hoped.

Finally, we split our first strawberry on Sunday and should have three more this week, if the straw keeps the slugs away. So sweet!