I don’t know about you, but I’ve watched a lot of Olympic coverage over the past two weeks. And I’ve enjoyed lots of it, particularly the volleyball, both beach and indoor, and basketball.

And I found lots of it compelling. I mean who doesn’t love watching a swimmer win his country’s fifth gold medal ever? Or watching a gymnast cheer her teammates to their own victories? Or a woman emerge victorious after her shoe sponsor dropped her because she’d had a baby and was never going to be fast again?

But I’ve also missed watching movies and tv shows, and I’m ready for those to return. Maybe next time they could make the Olympics be just one week, or better, yet, space the two weeks out better.

No? I suppose I can live with it as is.

I’ve got a three-day weekend, so I get to jam in some extra fun:

• Go to the beach on Monday.
• Check out the Indian music festival at the Kennedy Center’s outdoor arts space.
• Take some books back to the library.
• Finish the book I’m reading.
• Knit some more on my shawl, as well as a sock. I’d love to wrap up another two sections of the shawl and the last toe of the sock needed to complete the pair.
• Shop the Dog Days of Summer sidewalk sale in Shaw.
• Bake a blackberry cobbler.
• Root for the USA women’s basketball and volleyball teams in their gold round matches tomorrow.
• Watch the closing ceremony of the Olympics, perhaps while eating Japanese food again.
• Swim. We’re running out of pool days for the year!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A few fireflies still blink under a tree in the park.

2. A teammate shows up for our playoff game after telling us he’d have to miss because he still unexpectedly had family in town.

3. While putting up supports for some beans, I accidentally pull out one of the vines. I use my trowel to move some dirt to re-cover its roots and unearth several potatoes. After digging around a bit further, I’ve collected a quart’s worth.

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

Contrary to what you might understandably think, this is not an identical shot to last week’s post. I have made progress on both the shawl and the book, but it’s slow-going. The shawl more so than the book at this point, in part because it requires more thought. I’ll likely be done with the book by this weekend, but the shawl will drag on. The problem is that it just doesn’t match where my head is right now. I can’t even tell you why it’s hard; really it’s just one row out of four where I need to pay attention, and then every sixth row, there’s also a make-one increase tucked in at the end just to make sure I’m not getting too comfortable.

But I do have a pair of socks that have just needed a toe for months now, so maybe I’ll take a time-out on the shawl, finish the socks, and give myself some kind of Ravellenic Games win. It feels like that might be the kindest thing I can do in the next couple days.

I finished listening to Becoming Duchess Goldblatt while walking home from Safeway tonight. I hadn’t brought headphones, so everyone along the route got a snippet of the final three chapters. The Duchess would likely approve. I have Did You Hear What Happened to Lacey? queued up, but I also checked out a couple mysteries this evening as well. One of them is a collection of Poirot stories read by Christopher Lee and the actor who played Colonel Hastings on the David Suchet series.

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

Tonight’s sunset, particularly when viewed from the ballpark, was particularly amazing. We all felt lucky just to be there.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books that we were inspired to read simply because of their title or cover. Here are ten of the books I thought had clever titles:

1. Doughnuts and Other Proclamations of Love, by Jared Reck
2. How the Penguins Saved Veronica, by Hazel Prior
3. Pride and Premeditation, by Tirzah Price
4. Incense and Sensibility, by Sonali Dev
5. The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, by Kate Milford
6. The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks, by Mackenzi Lee
7. Rosie’s Travelling Tea Shop, by Rebecca Raisin
8. A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow, by Laura Taylor Namey
9. The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife, by Brad Balukjian
10. The List of Things That Will Not Change, by Rebecca Stead

How about you? What books have you read/do you plan to read because their titles caught your fancy?