Our weekend actually turned out pretty nice. Saturday, I caught up on sleep for the first half of the day. We spent five hours at our local watering hole with friends belatedly celebrating Rudi’s birthday and generally soaking up what turned out to be an ideal June evening. Oh, and I mostly finished my sock, too!

This morning I went to the farmers market and came home with strawberries and sweet cherries, among other things. I suspect there had been corn earlier in the morning, but I’m okay waiting until another day for that. I am hopeful for blueberries and raspberries sometime soon, though.

I spent a lot of time at the garden. All my plants (but not the beans) are in the ground. I harvested peas, herbs (you can see the basil on our supper capreses), strawberries, salad greens, my first cherry tomato of the season, and Swiss chard out of the main beds. Then, as I was planting the shallots in the potato patch, I discovered I had grown potatoes of actual size! I put them in around April 10, so we’re just around two months for a round trip from my kitchen and back! I’ve never done a midsummer harvest of potatoes, even though I know now is when I start finding new potatoes at the market. Some of them were tiny (once I’d severed their roots, there was really no going back), but some of them are of a saleable size! That’s about half a pint there — enough for a side dish!

I also got in a swim. I’m going to go do the dishes, take a shower, and then hit the hay. This week holds a baseball game, a movie, and a volleyball game if the weather finally cooperates again — and then maybe a trip to the beach on Saturday. I’m looking forward to it all.

I’m no closer to deciding what to knit for this year’s Tour de France knitalong than I was last year. But I promised to share some of the things I was thinking about, so, I thought I’d give you some of the 1-2 skein projects I’m looking at tonight and then share the 3+ skein projects later on. The links all go to Ravelry, should that be a helpful piece of information to you.

There are more here than I expected. And normally I would have Rudi help me filter them down and then bring them to you to help me decide. But he’s in bed and you’re always here (in a sense), so there we go.

First up is the XO Shawl. It’s knit with one skein of sock yarn and one of a silk mohair (both of which I should be able to wrangle out of my stash).

The Seladonia Shawl would give me the push to finally learn brioche

Either Winterberry, Crunch Time, or Orkidae Shawl would use two skeins of the same color. That gives me at least one option, but possibly just that.

Kingston Lacy could be knit in either fingering or lace, which gives me several options.

If I knit the Little Rainbow Shawl, I’d probably combine a solid with a gradient, rather than using mini skeins, which I don’t own.

Full Charged comes from the designer I knit my purple and pink 4-Ever in Blue Jeans shawl from two years ago.

Stonechurch is another mosaic design (colorwork done by slipping stitches, rather than knitting with two colors on the same row), which I seem to be attracted to a lot this past year.

Flowers in the Air is knit with a mohair blend and uses beads. The beaded socks I started knitting earlier this spring quickly went sideways, but I don’t really think that was the beads’ fault. Wispy Shawl doesn’t have any beads to complicate things.

Escanda uses just a single skein of sock yarn.

Hennes combines a solid and a variagated or self-striping skein.

What do you think? Do any of these catch your eye? Or, even better, have you made any of them yourself?

It’s been a crummy workweek, with one coworker leaving and the news that my boss is being switched into a new position a week after she gets back from vacation, and somehow deadlines don’t ever get crossed off. Volleyball was canceled due to rain. It was ridiculously hot and then ridiculously rainy, and I spent way too much time sitting in my apartment. I worked my butt off to clear enough stuff to be able to keep my laptop closed this weekend (and mostly my remaining colleagues are interested in keeping me sane) and this is how I’m going to spend my time:

• Spend several hours in the garden. I have some more planting to do. There are peas and greens to be picked. I want to get beans and the last of the plants I picked up in Connecticut into the ground.
• Go to the farmers market. We’re getting close to the end of strawberry season, but that means cherries, blueberries, and raspberries are on their way in.
• Swim. While I did bike down to meet my coworker to take her to a goodbye lunch, my only other activity has been swimming. The outdoor pool is only open on weekends for the next few weeks, so I need to get myself moving a little earlier.
• Knit outside. Tomorrow is Worldwide Knit in Public Day. I have no qualms about knitting pretty much anyplace, but I think my rainbow sock will be super popular in Dupont on Pride Weekend.
• Pick up holds at two libraries. I didn’t get to either library last weekend, so now I need to get to both this weekend. (One is in Virginia, so it’s less convenient than it might otherwise be.)
• Buy books. It’s the quarterly member sale at one of my local bookshops.
• Have a belated birthday happy hour for Rudi at our local watering hole. (It’s also a fancy grocery store and has some tasty food options they make in-house, including a surprisingly good grilled cheese. We also have a gift card from last spring that expires next week, so that’s a nice bonus.)
• Do laundry. How do I have no clean tshirts?
• Paint my nails. I keep only thinking of it right before bed.
• Sleep.

How about you? What are you hoping to get to this weekend? (And lest you worry overmuch about my working too hard, next week I have fun evening activities on three days and maybe plans to go to the beach on Saturday.)

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Getting to swim at the outside pool.

2. I take my supper and my book up to the park while Rudi’s on evening Zoom calls. It starts out sweltering, but fades to pleasant.

3. Many of the members of my team at work, staff and contractors, gather at my boss’ house for an afternoon picnic. We all greet each other with relieved hugs.

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

I finished up print and audio books this week and will complete the toe of my first sock tomorrow.

In the ears, I’ve started Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert, the third of the Brown sisters trilogy. I’m sad to wrap up their tales, but hold out hope the author will give their grandmother, Gigi, her own book(s).

On paper, I’m about to begin Mia P. Manansala’s Arsenic and Adobo, in which the main character’s life is described on the back cover as swerving from “Nora Ephron romp to an Agatha Christie case.” It’s slightly overdue, but I expect to quickly tear through it. (And our library system doesn’t charge fines, so it’s simply my own guilt over being a bad library citizen I need to overcome.)

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

Part of finding a sense of normalcy as the pandemic winds down is to return to things we had to postpone. Rudi and I used to love going to the movies, and, in fact, went to two in the final days before the world shut down in March 2020.

Here are the movies I’m most looking forward to seeing in the cinema:

In the Heights (June)
Black Widow (July)
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (July)
Respect (August)
Dear Evan Hansen (September)
Come from Away (September)’
The Addams Family 2 (October)
Eternals (November)
West Side Story (December)
Spiderman: No Way Home (December)

How about you? Are you looking forwad to trips to the theater?