Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. My friend Neal suggests that rather than do the sane thing, which is to pick up three additional players from the earlier round of volleyball games, we take on our opponents (who have ten players — enough for a full roster, plus four people ready to rotate in) with just the three of us who were able to make our match. I have my misgivings, but his confidence is contagious, and he, our teammate Chris, and I pull off a 2-0 victory.

2. Monday is a beautiful night for a ballgame and the Nationals must agree, because they decide to win the game.

3. Neal came over for supper and Ted Lasso, marking the first time we’ve had non-party company over in … five years. We agree that we’ll do it again, and I’ve already told my friend Anna and her partner that they should come sometime next month. And I just told Sarah to come for supper. How did I not notice this?

What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

My camera app has stopped working, and while this is annoying, it’s fine, as long as I find another app that does work before heading to New York on Friday. And I suppose even then it’ll be okay as long as Rudi or Eri take photos and share them with me.

In the meantime, let me share what I’ve been reading. I made some more progress with S.J. Bennett’s All the Queen’s Men on audio. I’d love to finish it tomorrow before we leave, so I can move onto my next audio option, but if I don’t, I’ll probably finish it on the train.

I did finish the first volume of Hikaru Nakamura’s Saint Young Men, a manga in which Jesus Christ and Buddha decide to take a year off after all the work at the millennium and spend a year living in a small apartment in Tokyo. It’s a thoughtful, but funny take on two divine immortals who also form a comedy act, have a blog, and have to live on a budget and not piss off their landlady. They have to deal with animals that want to sacrifice themselves when their cupboards are bare, celestial beings that would really like them to return home to heaven already, and inadvertently performing miracles, like Jesus accidentally turning the water at the bath house into wine because he found a pun funny. To help with in-jokes that aren’t obvious to an English-speaking audience, each of the 15 chapters is followed by an afterword with translations, context, and additional documentation.

Bout of Books has rolled around again. This is the final version of 2022 and the 35th iteration of the readalong.

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01 a.m. Monday, August 15, and runs through Sunday, August 21, in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 35 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team

During the readathon, I’d like to finish a couple books I have on the go so I can return them to the library. Today I read several chapters in Miss Moriarty, I Presume? by Sherry Thomas and listened to a chapter in All the Queen’s Men by S.J. Bennett.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten books we love that are more than a decade old. No problem! Here are mine, in no particular order:

1. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)
2. The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg (1985)
3. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (1989)
4. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (1936)
5. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (2001)
6. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (1908)
7. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (2011)
8. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2008)
9. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2007)
10. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)

On a side note, looking at this in Goodreads, I discovered the only years during the 20th century are:

1901, 1907, 1910 (although I may have read Kilmeny of the Orchard as a tween), 1914, 1916, 1924, and 1942 (although I think I read all the Moffats books as a kid). Just seven books could make the century complete, and included in those years are Baum, Wodehouse, and Christie publications. Hmmm…

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The final night of the Fort Reno summer concert series was just as gorgeous as the first. I’m not sure if it was that or the fame of the final performer, Ted Leo, that pulled in such a large crowd.

2. Because it had rained Friday evening, my friend Neal and I were on the hunt for restaurants with covered outdoor seating and a selection of vegetarian options. I stumbled across a mention of an Afghan restaurant near him, so we headed over for supper. Everything about the place — from the servers to the food — was lovely, and we dawdled at the table past closing time.

3. I got a chance to have a chat with one of my former coworkers, and it was good to hear how he was doing, even if some of his news wasn’t as positive as he would have hoped. He mentioned chatting again in the future, which was the best part of all.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately? Spread the beauty in the comments!

Eighteen months ago, I started a list of 50 things I wanted to try or do by the time I turned 50, three years off at that time.

I haven’t looked at the list in more than a year, when I’d gotten it up to 30 items which ranged from the monumental — clear our Rudi’s mom’s house — to the more mundane — grow something new in the garden each year. So tonight I opened up the document, checked off the things I could say I’d done definitively, noted ones that were in progress, added another dozen items to the list, and identified 12 I’d work on in the next six months.

I won’t share all of them here, but here’s half the list:

• Have a job where I don’t hate Mondays
• Write two of my favorite teachers from growing up
• Hang our art
• Read a novel by a Russian
• Win a volleyball league championship
• Get caught up on or rip out all my partially started knitting projects

Do you make plans or resolutions for your birthdays, particularly round ones?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share ten books with titles we find hilarious.

Hilarious is an awfully tall order. Let’s say the titles of these ten books I’ve read made me chuckle:

1. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
2. Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
3. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe
4. The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton
5. Evans Above by Rhys Bowen
6. Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living by Bailey White
7. The Big Over-Easy by Jasper Fforde
8. The Frog Who Croaked by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
9. I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter
10. Come Hell or Highball by Maia Chance

How about you? Are there book titles that have left you in stitches?