I spent a good amount of time outdoors this glorious first weekend of spring. Saturday afternoon, we wandered down to the Georgetown waterfront and sat and read and talked and ate snacks. Rudi made homemade pizza and we feasted on my cake (we’re down to a slice each tomorrow). I looked through some photos and sent some off to friends, so they could enjoy them, too.

Today it was so warm I was able to go to the farmers market in a tshirt and with bare legs. After a tasty late breakfast, I traveled over to Capitol Hill, where one of the nurseries I like is found. I picked up a couple of strawberry starts, as well as some other plants, and then got in touch with Sarah, who lives nearby. We checked out a new ice cream place and spent an hour sitting in the sun chatting. I metro’ed back to our side of town and decided to stop by the garden while there was still light and plant some of my new seedlings. I got two herbs, two salad greens, and a container of baby leeks into the ground before the sun slipped low enough I decided to call it quits.

The evening was spent watching the UConn women with Rudi, reading, knitting the toe decreases on my sock (I just have to kitchener the second sock and weave in the ends tomorrow!), painting my nails, drinking cocoa, and doing a little rearranging.

How was your weekend?

Wishing you all a truly happy spring with the opportunity to be outside and together with those you love.

I absolutely plan to be asleep at 5:37 a.m. EDT, but will be celebrating the arrival of spring in my dreams.

Once I wake, here are some other ways I’m hoping to mark the weekend:

• Tracking down strawberry plants for my garden and doing another planting of peas
• Reading
• Finishing the stripey pair of socks I had lingering on the needles before Sock Madness began
• Eating cake (I baked a sour cream and blueberry jam cake after Rudi went to bed and then ate two slices!)
• Making some space in the living room (I signed up for a series of pilates videos for the next 30 days and need to shift things around enough to do them)
• Spending time out in the sunshine
• Watching women’s basketball
• Having homemade pizza (unless we decide to metro up to our favorite pizzeria)
• Painting my nails
• Finding photos of our friend Jerry for his Zoom memorial service

How will you be spending the first days of spring?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The times you most appreciate renting, rather than owning, property is when there is a dead, bloated ROUS outside your window and someone has to remove it so it stops stinking up your living space.

2. Sunday was March 14 (aka Pi Day in the U.S.; places who write their dates with the month second observe it on July 22). We were feeling down after our friend’s death, so we pushed our celebration off by 24 hours, and I capped a day off by baking broccoli-cheese quiche and apple crisp. They were both quite tasty.

3. The extra hour of daylight every evening is absolutely worth misplacing an hour of sleep until fall.

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

So … Sock Madness 2021 … We can now officially chalk it up as the year I wasn’t paying attention.

See how we have two flowers next to each other?

We should not. They should be set off from one another, by half, so that they alternate down the leg like garden stepping stones, rather than like the rectangles of a hopscotch board. I just absolutely read the pattern wrong, which is a little irksome because I thought to myself that if I’d been designing this pattern I would have alternated them … exactly the way the designer did … rather than spacing the flower rows out by a couple dozen twisted rib rows.

It’s fine. I had already missed a smock on the other side, which would have eliminated me from competition anyway. But now I am left with the decision of what to do with the sock. Obviously it would be silly to keep knitting it the way I thought the pattern had been written, since I already didn’t think it should be done that way. I could rip it back to the start of the first flower and knit it right. In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t gone far past it, but I do not love twisted stitches and would prefer not to redo a couple dozen rows. I could decide I’m doing a variation, with a row of flowers at the top, not dissimilar from a band of colorwork and then just alternate from the nearest spot it makes sense to begin down the leg, which could look a little wonky with flowers that close together vertically, but also might look fine. I could come up with some other sort of variation that stops the twisted stitches once I get to the foot. Or, I could rip back to the cuff, which is pretty and not so many twisted stitches I would resent having to replicate them on a second sock and knit some other pattern down the leg. Thoughts? Other ideas?

I started Ring the Hill tonight and have not gotten very far, because I’m having to stop myself from wanting to tweet out/highlight gems of quotes every couple paragraphs. I’m in a bit of a reading funk, so finding something where I like the language is helpful, but not really for finishing a book quickly. I’m also still listening to The Midnight Library, but it’s also not hooked me so much that I want to listen nonstop.

If you want to see what others are knitting and reading, head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup.

Last week, Japanese Breakfast, which is the stage name of Michelle Zauner, just kept popping up on my radar. Sometimes that happens for a reason. The Grammy Awards were coming up and maybe she was nominated for something. But she wasn’t. So then I knew it was just the universe trying to tell me to look into it. I try not to ignore the universe, because the universe doesn’t like being ignored and tends to have nasty ways of upping the ante. No, I don’t know what the escalation would have been for not following up on a band named after a meal, and I don’t think I want to. Do you?

Anyway, the universe was right and the video that was out for her (their?) single, “Be Sweet,” was campy ’80s fun. I thought I’d share it with you here, because clearly that’s what the universe wants to have happen. It’s like a chain letter, but cosmic.

Apparently, she performed this song on Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, but I think the video makes the song. But I’m sure she was also good live.