I’d hoped for this weekend to split 50-50 sun and rain, but it’s looking more and more like the rain will fall overnight and the days will dry out. Normally, that would be ideal, but I really need to get some cleaning done around the apartment and it’s hard to force myself to forego sunlight when I spend all my weekdays hunkered down over a computer.

So I’ll definitely get outside. The potatoes that are currently growing in my kitchen have thus far refused to plant themselves (although they’re doing really well without soil so far). I raced the clock down to the library the other evening to pick up the latest Sherry Thomas before my hold expired, so I currently am in possession of several books I’m excited about reading. It would be great to spend some time in the park reading. And I probably also should get some actual exercise in, since volleyball starts up in ten days and I’m feeling woefully out of shape.

But that does put some pressure on Rudi and me to get some cleaning done in the evenings. I heard officially this week I’ll be home full-time at least through Labor Day, and there’s some additional thought being given to what the workplace looks like when we do return after that. (The D.C. office space for my organization has closed, so we’re taking the opportunity to reassess realistically what our needs are after 18 months.) Neither Rudi nor I can continue to just pile stuff up, which has been our M.O. for months, so we need to come up with a plan of attack for moving forward and making our small space work while we remain here. Unfortunately, Rudi and I both exist relatively well in chaos, which leads to our living space currently looking like someone set off a bomb in here. Wish us luck with solving that.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. So many things you wanted as a kid turn out to be a let down. But you know what wasn’t disappointing? Cinnamon rolls in a can from Trader Joe’s for Easter breakfast, supplemented with holiday sprinkles from the cabinet. The can opened with a satisfying “pop!” and five rolls meant Rudi and I got two nights of desserts out of it, in addition to my breakfast.

2. Trader Joe’s has had my favorite Sumo oranges and work sent me a box of navel oranges, so we’ve been pleasantly awash in citrus.

3. Rudi got his first shot this week, and there’s hope I’ll be able to get mine later this month.

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

A couple years ago, Rudi and I found ourselves at the beach on a very breezy day. I didn’t think much of it and enjoyed the day for what it was, reading my library book as usual. Until we got to the end of the day and it was time to pack up, when I went to close my library book and found I couldn’t. So much sand had blown in between the pages as I’d read it that it no longer lay flat. I literally ended up pouring sand out of the plastic cover and shaking out each page before it even remotely resembled something I could return to the library in good faith.

So this week, when faced with a breezy forecast, I brought two books to the beach. One, An Unexpected Peril, was my current read, a new book of which I am the first reader of the library copy. There was a breeze, albeit a gentle one, so I opted to keep it in my bag. Instead, I started Silva Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, which I procured from a Little Free Library sometime in the last year. Set in Mexico in the 1920s, it focuses on a teen girl who accidentally frees a Mayan god from a locked trunk in her grandfather’s room and who then must help him on a quest in order to save her own life. So far, so good.

On the knitting front, I’m down to a handful of rows on my Smock Madness socks, so I decided to pull out Wohin?, the pair of socks I didn’t finish from Sock Madness 2020. I only made it halfway through the heel flap before the world started to shut down and with it my desire to knit. I’ve done nothing more than find the UFO, so I have no info on whether this is the right project to tackle next or not, but I figured I’d at least take a look.

Head to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup of reading and crafting.

Say hello to my Winter 2021 Stripey Socks:

They were knit in Havirland Pax Socks in the Holiday Hangover colorway on US 1.5 dpns.

I started them in mid-January, finished knitting them in early March, and finally got around to weaving in the ends on Palm Sunday.

They are perfect for wearing to (but not really on) the beach on a bright spring day, and I love how happy they make me.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday list from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share books that frustrated us in one way or another. I rarely carry on reading books I hate, so there are plenty of books I’ve let go over the years, but this particular prompt suggests antipathy to me, which means I have to truly resent a book in one way or another, and that means I actually thought it worth carrying on until the end for one reason or another. Here are the nine one-star reads I have recorded on Goodreads, which amounts to “I finished it, but wish I hadn’t”:

1. Fat Vampire, by Adam Rex
2. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
3. A Walk to Remember, by Nicholas Sparks
4. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
5. The Pearl, by John Steinbeck
6. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
7. Summer People, by Marge Piercy
8. Needled to Death, by Maggie Sefton
9. Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark & Carol Higgins Clark

How about you? Do you have any books you want to chuck in the ocean?

In the last week, the garden went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

Partly it’s because I spent a good portion of this afternoon digging up sections of my bunching onions and shifting them to the fenceline so I could put in the flat of new plants Rudi and I bought yesterday. (I added a couple new herbs, celery, yellow onions, strawberries, and flowers.)

And partly it’s because things are finally really starting to grow.

We have violets:

We have peas:

And we have spring greens:

I love this time of the year at the garden. You can really see the difference at every visit!