Wanted to let you all know I’m still alive, but that it’s been a busy couple days and I probably won’t slow down until my layover in Chicago on Wednesday morning.

In the meantime, here’s some of what I’ve been up to:

Saturday night plans were rained out, but I got a rainbow and a conversation with Karen instead. More than a fair trade, I think.

Sunday, Rudi came home. We celebrated National Ice Cream Day with cones from Larry’s.

Tonight, the 2022 season of the Fort Reno concert series kicked off. Rain threatened, but the organizers are more than 50 years into this thing and they know enough to wait it out. We ended up with a nearly perfect night.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My dahlia has bloomed.

2. I had lunch with one friend and supper with another this week.

3. This was the first week of summer volleyball coaching. We had five kids show up, all of whom were very enthusiastic about playing and learning.

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

Today was the midpoint of the Tour de France, which means I should be at the midpoint of my shawl.

…

Clearly we aren’t there. But I am happy with how pretty it looks, so when this shawl takes me a while longer, I will be happy to continue on with it. And I’ll definitely have brioche down.

First thing Friday morning, Rudi and I boarded a bus to New York City to catch a show. We rode Citi Bikes (those New York cyclists are a lawless bunch, but their traffic lights force them to be) to Chinatown, where we were staying, ate a delicious lupper of vegetarian dim sum in a covered streetery, checked out a bookstore, and took a nap in the afternoon. In the evening, we biked up to the theater to take in the penultimate performance of Macbeth, starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga (the girl in the flower dress from Agents of SHIELD). Before returning to the hotel, we stopped in Little Italy, in search of a cup of coffee for Rudi and found a patisserie with delicious cannoli, which we took back to our 11th-floor view of lower Manhattan.

The next morning, Rudi got up and caught a flight to Denver, and I bummed around the city for a while longer before catching the bus back to D.C. I returned to Little Italy to a shop where I’d seen Italian ice advertised for a taste of home. I knit for a while in the park across the street from the hotel after checking out. I biked over to one of the tea shops we like and stopped at a street fair en route.

It was a good trip, and I’m already looking forward to returning in August when we catch two Tony-winning musicals, The Strange Loop and Paradise Square.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us about book covers that remind of us of summer. Here are ten that do that for me from the subset of books I’ve read in the past decade:

Rudi is away this week, but I still have a full list of things to do while he’s out west:

• Apply for a couple jobs I saved last week. (The three-month sabbatical I gave myself to lounge around is over, and now I need to start lining something up for the fall.)
• Clean the apartment. (Yes, technically this should be a two-person job, but I think we each find it easier to make progress if only one of us does the work at a time. Plus, I have a friend I’d like to have over for the first time, and I’d like not to have him back away slowly when I open the door. It was much easier when I lived in a dorm and my messy room was just open to the world all the time.)
• Acquire quarters, so I can make progress on Mount Laundry.
• Finish a couple books. (I have at least three that are overdue.)
• Keep plugging away on my shawl. (Honestly, the brioche is slower going than I expected it would be, but I like it so far.)
• Talk with some friends. (We’ve let it go too long.)
• Pick tomatoes in the garden. (I’ve already eaten the first cherry tomatoes of the season. Sweet!)
• Hang out with the volleyball team.
• Work on my Camp NaNoWriMo writing project. I made almost no progress last week, but am confident that I can get myself back on track.
• Bake.
• Finalize my #GiftmasinJuly package, so I can get it out the door by early next week.
• Swim.
• Spend time outside.

A baker’s dozen of chores, must-do’s, and fun things. What are you hoping to do this week?