Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My job gives me plenty of sick leave. Which meant even though work was only as far away as my sofa, I didn’t have to go to it for a couple days while I was feeling under the weather.

2. My dad made new cds, which arrived via post yesterday afternoon. Nothing makes recuperation better than new music.

3. A new restaurant opened in the neighborhood and did a one-day charitable soft launch, where they only charged $5 for entrees. Rudi went and picked some up for us, and my falafel bowl is waiting in the fridge for me to feel up to reheating it.

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

Apologies for not doing a better job of clearing off the chair before taking a picture of my knitting, but I’ve been sick (not COVID), and I wasn’t being especially observant.

At the halfway point of the Tour de France, I’m about halfway through the number of rows in Reyna. While the pattern says to block it somewhat aggressively when done, the shawl seems small at this point, but that can be hard to tell. I still have a good-size ball, but the shawl will start eating yarn from here on out. Also, the pattern seems less to break up my variegated yarn and more to cause it to flash, which while interesting, isn’t necessarily what I was looking for. It’s fine and I may love it yet. I don’t not love it currently, so I think that’s probably okay.

Reading-wise I’m not really concentrating on any one book, except maybe my Agatha Christie novel. I have a pretty good idea of whom the bad guy is, but I still have about a third of the book left to go to figure out what his deal is.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is a little open ended, inviting us to consider books for our younger selves. However, what I want at the end of a long weekend is simple and concrete (although I kept having to expand my parameters to get to 10, so I failed). Here, then, are ten books that were published before I left middle school that I liked as an adult and probably would have loved as a kid:

1. The Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper: Adolescent and teen me would have loved the moodiness of this series.
2. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin: This caper is great for any age, but I would have loved it when I was in elementary school.
3. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson: I read Paterson’s teen novels and come up with no reason for why I skipped this one, but I had a penchant for melodramatic death novels as a kid.
4. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende: I liked the movie a lot.
5. The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden: I haven’t read this novel about a Romani orphan with a 21st-century lens and don’t remember enough about it to know whether it would be considered offensive by today’s standards. But when I read it in 2001, I loved it and know my younger self would have as well. (I enjoyed several of her doll books as a kid.)
6. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster with illustrations by Jules Feiffer: I discovered this fantasy novel when I was in college, skivving off from class in the stacks of children’s books housed between my classroom door and the restroom.
7. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg: This is another book I didn’t discover until college, but this time thanks to my friend Rebecca.
8. The Tales of Magic series by Edward Eager: My bff, Karen, gave me the first few novels of this series when I moved away to D.C.
9. The Swallows and the Amazons series by Arthur Ransome: This is a series that just didn’t get the attention in the U.S. that it should have (or maybe it had fallen out of favor, although I don’t see them in used bookstores like I would expect to if that had been the case) until after the first couple Harry Potter books were published.
10. Matilda by Roald Dahl: Charlie made his rounds in my sixth-grade class, but this book-loving, butt-kicking girl arrived just a little too late for us.

How about you? Are there books that were around when you were a kid that you didn’t get to until years later?

My garden plot was all cherry tomatoes and bunching onion flowers and budding milkweed, which was fine, but I wanted something more, so I headed out yesterday with the intention of bringing home new plants.

The only problem with buying new plants is that then you have to plant them! (more…)

I didn’t really notice tonight’s sunset, but last night’s was particularly stunning: