With the winding down of all but one of my over-the-air tv shows (which wraps up in three weeks), I’m putting out my semi-annual appeal for recommended series to stream.

Shows we/I have enjoyed recently: The Equalizer, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Rebel, Teenage Bounty Hunters, Mr. Iglesias, Julie and the Phantoms, Haven, Life Is Murder, Punky Brewster, Stacked, Good Omens, Magnum, Miss Scarlet and the Duke, The Republic of Doyle, Frankie Drake Mysteries, His Dark Materials, and All Creatures Great and Small.

I don’t want anything that veers from mystery/detective show into thriller, I won’t bother with reality tv or dramas that get too soapy, and I prefer comedies that are kind. If you have a recommendation, please leave it in the comments.

Ultimately, tv watching is escapism for me. I want characters I’ll like and happy endings. (And if your gut instinct is to recommend Schitt’s Creek, you aren’t the first, but give me a midway point to start the series. If I like the characters I’ll keep going (and even go back to when they were horrible), but I’m not going to sit through two seasons just to maybe get to a point where I don’t hate them all.)

The Tour de France begins five weeks from today, which unless something drastic happens, my annual knitalong begins then, too.

I loved the shawl I made in 2020, after passing by the pattern at least twice. And I’ve loved other shawls I’ve knit as part of that knitalong. I don’t always rarely finish in the allotted time period, but at least they get done, as opposed to sweaters I’ve attempted to make. So, I think I’ll start now looking over shawl patterns I like and thinking about the yarn I own. That way I won’t spend the first couple days of the knitalong futzing around, mulling options and wasting precious knitting time.

Expect a couple posts about this in the meantime as I mull options. Part of the fun is getting folks to weigh in, even if I don’t promise to heed your advice. (Rudi absolutely did not love Reyna, but adores how it looks in the skein of yarn he’d given me the previous Christmas.)

We’re heading north at the end of the week (!!!), so a certain part of this weekend will be dedicated to tidying the apartment. I also need to do laundry.

I keep suggesting to Rudi that we should celebrate his birthday with some friends (he was out of town last Sunday), but so far nothing’s come of that. I’ll raise the point again.

I’d like to do some baking, but I’ll only do that if it actually gets warm enough in the apartment for me to let Rudi close the window and turn on the a/c. Tomorrow night it’s not supposed to drop below 70 outside (::whimper::), so that is a possibility. But the one perk of living below ground, particularly during the spring’s first heat wave, is that we’re insulated against the heat for a lot longer than other people. I have a love/hate relationship with a/c, so the longer I can go without turning it on, the happier I am. (Rudi, not so much.) But if I introduce heat inside the apartment (or the cleaning takes on its own heating element), it’s far more certain Rudi will draw the line.

Garden (literally, as in from my garden) salads are also on the agenda. I’ve been picking a couple bags of greens each week, but the impending heat is signaling the end of the arugula, at the very least. I’ve been really good about staying on top of bolting greens this year, but the temperatures have been on my side, and I may have to pick entire plants, rather than just plucking the largest leaves if the weather doesn’t cooperate. We’ve got a couple salad dressings we’re really grooving on from the farmers market (strawberry poppyseed and green goddess), which I find helps make the salads feel distinct from each other. When we get back from Connecticut, I might try the bakery’s housemade blue cheese dressing. I put in a couple hours in the garden this evening, but without any certainty of rain in the forecast, I’ll have to go water and pick snap peas and strawberries.

And otherwise, who knows? Maybe the park concert. Hopefully some knitting and reading.

How about you? What are you getting up to this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The scent reaches me before I see it: there’s honeysuckle climbing its way down the hill.

2. My midweek visit to the garden yields the first strawberries and snap peas of the season. Plus, I’m able to include vegetables I grew in two meals in a single day (greens in a lunch salad and rainbow chard with supper)

3. A colleague and I take one of our interns out for lunch to celebrate her graduation (and to meet her for the first time in person). We all hug.

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

I got through the heel of my sock during a conference call yesterday and am on to the foot. At least I think I am. I decreased the heel more than usual, so I need to try on the sock once the foot’s a little longer to make sure it doesn’t muck up the fit.

And I started two new books. On paper, it’s Sonya Lalli’s Serena Singh Flips the Script. Set in my neighborhood, it’s the story of a young woman figuring out how to find your people as an adult. I heard about it on my birthday weekend as part of an author event hosted by one of my local bookshops. So far, so good, which makes me happy, because one of her other titles has been in my audiobooks queue for a while.

And in my ears, it’s The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser about a middle-aged English woman who, after losing her marriage and her job in near proximity, discovers she’s inherited a great uncle’s Scottish house and library of first editions. It just so happens there’s a kind-hearted but curmudgeonly antiquarian bookseller in town…

Want to see what others are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup!

Apparently the desire to leave my house and see people again makes me want to buy new clothes. Friday I bought a couple casual tshirts online during a sale. Saturday I took myself to TJ Maxx for the first time since the pandemic and came away with several tops I could wear for work calls and a sundress I need to try on for Rudi. Yesterday, I ordered shorts, none of which may fit. But apparently I’m tired of the clothes I’ve been Zooming in for the past 15 months. Now, if I could just find some underwire-free bras for a reasonable price and get a Target BOGO sale on underwear, I’d be a very happy camper!