Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl asks for ten of our favorite childhood books, which I took to mean books I read up through elementary school:

1. Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss (While I love the message of this book and credit it for being a cornerstone of my beliefs in empathy and using your voice and collective action, I also acknowledge that Seuss has a problematic relationship with race in some of his books.)
2. Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham (My approach to insects indoors dates to this book. I can vaguely recall a time where I’d screech for my parents to come kill any spider I came across as a little kid, so I’m guessing that may be where this book’s arrival in my life came from. Since reading it, though, I tolerate many types of insects living in the corners of my apartment — there’s a spider in the bathroom as we speak — although I admit it’s an unequal system that’s biased against mosquitoes, wool moths, ants, flies, and cockroaches, in part because of their ability to wreak havoc and in part because of their tendency to show up in spring-break in Florida quantities if allowed to stay.)
3. Richard Scarry’s Please and Thank You Book (Honestly, I have no idea why. I have never given this book as a baby shower gift, although it is still in print.)
4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (I have mentioned before that when my town was building a new, modern library, they sent a librarian around to my school to encourage us to get a library card when they opened. She came a couple of times, reading us a chapter of this book at a time. It worked. I got a library card — and copies of the first three books in the series for Christmas.)
5. Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parrish (Yet another book I was introduced to in school, this time by our second-grade teachers who would pull both classes into one room — this literally meant sharing desk chairs — and read one of the books in this series aloud to us periodically. If you don’t know it, it features a very literal-minded housekeeper and her upper-crust employers who are prone to ask her to draw the drapes or dress the chicken while they’re out only to return to artwork or their dinner still raw but suited up. This is a silly children’s series for people who love the power of words.)
6. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (My maternal grandmother took this out of the library to preview whether it was suitable for me and I found it and started reading it. She quickly returned it to the library, so she could buy me a copy for my birthday, and took out A Little Princess instead in an attempt to derail my interest, but I was hooked and grabbed my library’s copy to finish it. Not to worry, I’ve read this copy many times since then.
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Also, Eight Cousins. I read both dozens of times. None of the other four books in the Alcott collection I have (one of my favorite gifts ever from my paternal grandparents) come anywhere close. Maybe it’s time for a reread.)
8. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (This is the book that made me a book buyer. I received this copy as a gift for Christmas. (We got book plates that same year and I clearly recognized how nice a book this was, because I convinced my brother to trade me one of his color bookplates for one of my black-and-sepia ones just to use in it.) But I bought the rest of the series, and some of her other titles one at a time at Walden Books in the mall.)
9. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (I loved Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace and Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit. And then I loved Vicky and Poly and Canon Tallis.)
10. Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene (This is the first of the Nancy Drew books and while it’s probably not my favorite (I preferred the George and Bess books, rather than the Helen ones), it’s the one that made me a mystery reader. I think my mother gave me the first five books for Christmas one year (the 1960s edits, rather than the 1930s originals) and then I took off from there. I read them quickly and then tore through every copy I could get my hands on from our library. I even read some of contemporary The Nancy Drew Files series that came out when I was in middle school.)
11. Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion by Julie Campbell (I’m guessing this was another gift from my folks, because I owned a bunch of them, and I don’t know that I would have bought any of them myself without having read the first one, and this wasn’t a series my library carried. While I liked Nancy Drew, I related to Trixie, who had siblings, chores, and a more realistic life.)

Oops. I ended up with 11, but with a lifetime of book love, that seems a reasonable number

It was a quiet final weekend in June.

Yesterday was one of our garden work days. It was miserably hot and humid under the full, blaring sun, and, as one of our fellow gardeners said, it did not take long before you felt like a turkey with a pop-up thermometer, where when you reached a certain temperature, you were done.

After pulling the last of our lettuce, Rudi and I stopped for milkshakes on our way home as a reward for our work. And then I took a nap as a reward for having gotten up early.

While I was asleep, Rudi managed to get our swollen window closed and then got the air conditioner working. It’s a nice change to live in the cool again. It meant that when Rudi turned on the oven to make pizza, it wasn’t completely miserable. (To be honest, I suspect we both would have passed on the pizza if we’d had to bake along with it.)

This morning, I headed to the farmers market, where I found both red and black raspberries (but no yellow raspberries yet). I also came home with our first ears of corn (so sweet!) for the season and a flat of sour cherries at Rudi’s request for turning into pies.

This afternoon, we headed down to the Mall for Folklife Festival. Apparently the D.C. focus was only on Saturday, but we still got to hear some good music on a still hot, but less humid, afternoon. And we were pleasantly surprised to discover there was also a small, local international food festival going on, so we stopped for some locally brewed lavender limeade and a tofu bun.

Then we biked over to the pool for the last hour. It was understandably packed, but felt so refreshing. We stopped to water our plot again, and encountered the mom and baby bunny happily munching through our vegetables. They enjoyed the last of my shelling peas I’d left on the vine to pick later this week. I hope they don’t like peppers or tomatoes…

How was your weekend?

Sunset over Georgetown as we were walking back from Trader Joe’s (we went a little cheese-crazy).

The last days of June are slated to bring more of the hot, hazy, humid weather that’s been pressing down on D.C. this week. Today, after a morning excursion, I pretty much hid in our bedroom in front of the fan with all the rest of the lights in the apartment off. Obviously, that should not be my M.O. for the weekend, so here’s my plan:

• Work at the garden. Saturday is one of our periodic garden work days where we all put in time on the communal spaces of the garden. Plus, I’d like to get some beans planted in my plot, now that Rudi and I have found the ground again.
• Go swimming.
• Read a book. I’d like to get With the Fire on High back to the library. Acevedo is a D.C. resident and there’s a long hold list on this already overdue book.
• Check out the Folklife Festival. This year’s government shutdown put the kibosh on their usual international festival, so they opted to examine the social power of music, with a specific focus on the music of D.C.
• Track down raspberries at the farmers market. Yes, I’m still on the hunt.
• Deal with the fruit in my fridge.
• Find the title to the car. It’s here someplace. Just not in any of the places I’ve looked so far. Probably this requires a more concerted cleaning effort. Also, I maybe wasn’t looking far enough back, since I was thinking we’d brought it down in 2012, but apparently it was 2009 or early 2010.
• Repaint my nails. (Obviously after the garden work…)
• Eat pizza. It seems like a good weekend to do that, but we might punt it to next week.
• Replenish my tea canisters. And make iced tea, since I’ll have the box with all my teas in it open.
• Do laundry. I really wish I’d remembered we’d need quarters while I was out today. Now I need to hit the atm and the bank (but not the atm at the bank, where it charges money) before heading to the garden in the morning…
• Watch a film, probably at home. We have The Kid Who Would Be King out from the library, I have a free rental from Red Box that I have to use by Monday, and I see Kanopy has acquired Colette. Plus Netflix keeps adding new movies practically every week.

How about you? What’s on your weekend agenda?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. D.C. is in the midst of a heat wave, which makes doing anything feel gross. I went to the pool yesterday evening for the last couple hours it was open for the day and it was easily ten degrees cooler there than elsewhere in the neighborhood. (It’s adjacent to a park and woods that run down to a creek.)

2. As my friend and I were walking past my building to the bar this evening after our volleyball game, we happened upon my upstairs neighbor, who was out trying to share some of her homemade cookies.

3. I made pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes last year and I finally defrosted some of it to have for supper last night alongside our daiquiris, made with strawberries I’d also frozen last summer.

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

I ripped back my Lightning Shawl to try to fix that bad color shift when I switched yarns. This might be better — or it might be equally as bad. I think I’ll have to knit another couple inches away from it in order to really tell. I’m just so ready to be done with this project. Probably I should have just stopped after the end of the last strip, but I really wanted the shawl to be a little deeper than it was…

Below is the pre-ripping. Essentially, I pulled it back to before that solid golden splotch in the middle and am trying to make the gradient before and the gradient after play nicely. I have some long ends, so I’m wondering if I use it to sort of duplicate stitch over some of the other pre-merge point to help create a better semblance of matching.

Reading-wise, I started Elizabeth Acevedo’s new novel, With the Fire on High, tonight. So far, I’m really enjoying it. (Bridget, it’s set in Philly!) It’s about a senior in high school who lives with her abuela and her two-year-old daughter, Emma, and who loves to experiment in the kitchen.

The audio copy of Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You came back off the holds list for me, so that’s what I’m listening to on my phone. I need to start listening to Daisy Jones and the Six this weekend, though, in order to give the cds back to the library.

Want to see what other folks are reading and crafting? Head to As Kat Knits for the round-up.