I promise a more in-depth report over the weekend when I will be through knitting my sock, either through to the next round of Sock Madness or eliminated from competition if the final 12 spots fill before I finish. Either way, I will have some time to catch up on posting and pictures and reading and gardening and cleaning and being in touch with friends.

In the meantime, let us consider three beautiful things from the past week:

1. The Nats beat the Phillies in the first game Rudi and I attend this season. A chilly evening leaves us shivering, but watching Livan Hernandez toss slowball after slowball past swinging batters and seeing Jason Werth ignore the taunts of Phillies fans in attendance make the win particularly enjoyable.

2. Rudi comes home after a meeting with a hand-packed container of ice cream from our favorite local shop.

3. We have a baby shower at work for three moms-to-be. I pick up nine brightly hued, helium-filled balloons from a local shop to decorate their chairs. Despite the breezy weather, the balloons and I all make it safely back to the office.

How about you? What beautiful things have you noticed this week?

One of the best things about living in a city is how the absurd somehow becomes normal.

I have no idea what this is about. Part of a protest? Guerrilla art? College prank? Theater project? Unusual courting accessory? Could be any of them. Or none. It might just be that three guys (with two girls trotting behind them) decided to wheel a two-story, papier-mâché figure around town and show it a good time. They were headed toward the section of Dupont with all the bars after all…

I’m welcoming you in with the pattern for the third round of Sock Madness and a head cold. Let’s plan on spending more time on the former and less on the latter, shall we?

Oh, and let’s also put some effort into nice weather for Sunday, which is the kite festival’s make-up date. I’ve got plans with a dragon.

We can now look back on three beautiful things from the first week in April:

1. The lovely spring weather permits outdoor meals with friends this week. Sunday I eat crêpes with Phillip, Susan, and Holden. And Wednesday I have Thai food with Amani and Sarah.

2. We run up to Politics and Prose to collect my Jasper Fforde novel and walk in on an author talk. It turns out to be Jacqueline Winspear, whose Maisie Dobbs series has intrigued me since we saw a Masterpiece production of one of the novels a few years back. I leave with a signed edition of the first book in the series.

3. Rudi and I bike to the Tidal Basin after work on Monday to catch the cherry blossoms before they disappear. Although the trees on the Mall side are a bit past peak, the ones by FDR are glorious and we walk a leisurely loop as the sun sets over Virginia. A large storm moves through early Tuesday morning and a drive past after work suggests we captured the last really perfect day for the trees.

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

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

From the jacket: “In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950 — and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. ‘I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.’”

My take: Nestled outside of the village of Bishop Lacey sits the manor house of Buckshaw. Its inhabitants include the absent-minded widower (and avid philatelist) Colonel de Luce; his three somewhat annoying daughters, Daphne, Ophelia, and Flavia; and the Colonel’s factotum, Dogger, who suffers from the occasional bout of PTSD, stemming from the war. The story centers around the precocious youngest daughter, Flavia, who is a budding scientist, as was her mother, Harriet, who died while Flavia was quite young but whose presence still looms large around the estate.

The same curiosity and attention to detail that serve Flavia in her experiments prove useful when unusual events start to occur. First, a dead bird is left on the doorstep with an unusual stamp pierced by its beak. Then a stranger is overheard arguing with her father in his study late at night. Finally, she discovers a man dying in the garden.

When the police arrest Flavia’s father for the man’s murder, it is up to his youngest, know-it-all child to piece together a complete story from random facts, odd scientific know-how, and bits of 30-year-old stories from the Colonel and other residents of Bishop Lacey. But will the truth be revealed before it’s too late for the de Luce family?

I guess it would be fair to say I liked this book, but I found the heroine to be more than a little annoying. Perhaps she cut a little close to home in some of her attributes? Nonetheless, there was something gripping about Flavia’s tenacious quest for the truth, her overtly ambitious quest to be the person to solve the mystery, and her deductive grasp of facts. And it was impossible to read the story without being at least occasionally affected by the competition between the three girls for their father’s rare attention and their desperate desire to find an expression of love in their emotionally stunted lives.

I offer a tentative endorsement of the book. If you like other self-absorbed sleuths (Poirot and Holmes spring immediately to mind), I feel Flavia will suit you well. I liked it well enough that I will probably read the second book in the series, but not so much that I will run right out to request it.

Pages: 373

I promised in my last post to provide proof that I do, in fact, finish projects. I’ve finished four so far this year, but have been bad about taking pictures of my completed objects, so I’ll work on getting some nice shots of the rest to share with you posthaste.

In the meantime, here are the most recent pair of socks, as modeled by their intended recipient:

The pattern is Nornir, designed specifically for Sock Madness 5 by Caoua Coffee. It’s named after the Norse spirits who weave the threads of life.

I bought this Shibui yarn several years back in a destash by Isela (the Purling Sprite) specifically so I could knit socks for Rudi. When I read that this stitch pattern was specifically good at breaking up pooling, I decided this yarn might be the right match. After checking with Rudi that he liked the design of the sock, I was off.

I was a bit worried at the beginning, because the pooling at the top ribbing of the sock is atrocious in an ugly 1970s kind of way. (You can see a little of that in the photo above.) But as I left the ribbing behind, the yarn settled into a nice mixture and stayed that way until I got to the gusset decreases. Again, I was unhappy with the way the yarn behaved, but Rudi assured me that he found it interesting and didn’t mind it. I don’t know if he would have said that even if I hadn’t been knee deep in competitive knitting at that point, but I prefer to think that he just has a more open approach to color than I do.

The heels and toes are knit in Koigu, in a tone that matches the burgundy in the Shibui pretty well. I’m happy with the way they came out, and Rudi seems to be, too.

Plus, I finished knitting them early enough to advance into the third round of Sock Madness, which will be my best year yet.