It was a quiet weekend at the Burrow, with Rudi out of town pursuing a snowy ski hill for his team of young racers.

There were errands and chores, but they were interspersed with time outside, trips to the library, and hours of reading.

I thought about going to a free concert, but it would have required dressing up and getting over there, and in the end pj’s, French bread pizza, and videos on the couch with the cats won out. (A Christmas Prince: A Royal Wedding got better as I watched it, in keeping with the first one; Thoroughly Modern Millie was disappointing with its unnecessary and racist Chinese-American subplot. )

You just need to spend $5 on a bouquet of spray roses at Trader Joe’s.

Every year, in late February or early March, I place an order for a year’s worth of tea from a shop in New York City. I usually order somewhere around 8 pounds of tea across 10-12 types, but it varies, depending on what we’ve been drinking and what my tea supplier has in stock.

By January, I’m usually out of one or two kinds, but as you can see here, I’m still going strong, although I can see which teas I’m likely to be cutting it close on. (We bought a couple additional pounds during trips to New York City during 2018, so I’ll need to up my order for at least two kinds this winter.) And finishing up one or two types forces me to drink things I like, but like less than my normal six varieties.

I now know, for instance, that I need two pounds of Irish Breakfast tea to make it through the year. Keemun, which is the base for English Breakfast, was my go-to for a while, but a couple years ago there must have been a problem with the supply because the cost for the leaves went way up, and the English Breakfast blend is good, but not as good. Did you know that while English Breakfast tea is generally made from Chinese tea leaves, Irish Breakfast tea nowadays is a blend of two Indian varieties — Assam and Ceylon?

In case you’re wondering, the family go-to’s, in addition to our two breakfast blends, are Ceylon (if you buy the Ceylon from Porto Rico, skip the cheaper Ceylon OP for the Ceylon Kenilworth Garden (the name of the estate where it’s grown), because it’s a superior tea), Assam, and Yunnan. We also drink a lot of Earl Grey (my supplier makes a very nice version that has just the right amount of bergamot) and, depending on the mood, smokey Lapsang Souchong (that’s what’s in the ceramic jar) and Gurance, a citrusy Nepalese tea. We have a couple more in our rotation, including Java Santosa (an Indonesian black tea), Golden Kenyan (anything with golden in the name tends to mean it’s a less dark hues), and a custom blend from our second go-to tea shop in Greenwich Village (that has been in business since the late 1800s) that they say is the three-tea blend they made for Katherine Hepburn when she was alive.

I also have a large collection of Darjeelings, but Rudi and I have gone off them a bit in the last couple years (tea quality varies from year to year depending on the growing season and the drying process. I just hit a year that I didn’t love so much and can’t seem to force myself to drink it so I can buy a different year’s blend). They have the most number of grades you can buy, meaning you can pick your tea based on how big the leaves were before they started roasting them. In general, the more letters that appear when describing your Darjeeling, the better the tea. Nearly all the classifications (other than the lowest one, “D” for “dust”) end in “OP” which stands for Orange Pekoe. Orange Pekoe actually means tea leaf buds when used by tea growers, but the term seems to stand in for generic black tea when used by tea bag manufacturers these days.

Feel free to stop by for a cuppa!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I got the chance to try the recent ice cream addition to the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Mount Desert Island Ice Cream. I opted for a cone of Cranberry Bar Bliss, modeled after the Starbucks holiday dessert. The creamsicle-flavored base was studded with white chocolate chips and candied cranberries and ginger. It was delicious.

2. On of my favorite things about walking around D.C. is getting to see all the brightly-hued murals tucked away into corners of the city, like this one, Anne Marchand’s “Community,” on a wall overlooking a park/playground in Shaw.

3. All sorts of flowering shrubs and bushes are blooming right now, including rhododendron and roses.

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

I’ve only got half of this week’s unraveling here, having not knit a stitch in a week. I will put a pair of socks on the needles tomorrow and will pull out a project that’s further along to work on until I am feeling like working on the shawl I showed you last week.

I am delighted to report though, that I am enjoying the latest Lady Sherlock novel, The Hollow of Fear, tremendously. Charlotte is currently masquerading as Sherrinford Holmes, brother to the fictional Sherlock, whom she also portrays in the series, hoping to figure out how the estranged wife of her dearest friend, Lord Ashcroft Ingram, ended up dead in his ice house. Sherrinford cuts a far more dandified figure than Sherlock, who is too much an invalid to see anyone in person, relying on intermediaries to relate his revelations to those seeking his expertise.

Next up will be An American Marriage and Children of Blood and Bone, both of which were due back to the library today. The latter has a far shorter wait list to take it out again, should I decide to be an upright library user and return them immediately. (We have a 30 day grace period before fines kick in…)

I finished listening to the last of Cornelia Funke’s When Santa Fell to Earth last night. I should listen to the last few chapters of American Street so I can stop having to borrow and reborrow it. It’s stressful, though, so I tend to be inclined to leave it until it’s too late to listen to what remains before it expires from my phone… After that, I’m thinking The Lido, which I understand makes you feel good about life.

Head over to As Kat Knits to learn what everyone else is reading and knitting.

Rudi and I got to more movies this past year than I ever have, averaging a new film every two weeks. That’s thanks in large part to AMC’s free Stubs Insider program, which offers $5 tickets on Tuesdays. We have two AMC theaters close by and a third within the District, so that offers a lot of screens to choose from. I also try to pay attention to free screenings, but those have grown in popularity, so I feel like they’re far harder to get into than they once were.

Anyway, what this means is that we actually saw more than 10 new releases in the theater, as well as catching some of the year’s earlier films on DVD/streaming, so I can do more than just list the only ten films we saw this year. Also worth noting is that these are the films I liked best, rather than the films I thought were the best pieces of art. I can appreciate the importance of a movie without ever needing to see it again. These, on the other hand, I’d re-watch, which is probably the best compliment I can offer.

10. The Greatest Showman: This came out in December 2017, but we didn’t see it until January. Unlike Mary Poppins, this had a stellar soundtrack, which I absolutely adored and which has now spawned a tribute album that I’m eager to listen to. The acting, however, varied, as did the pacing a bit.

9. Bohemian Rhapsody: This was a highly enjoyable, well acted biopic of Freddy Mercury and his time with one of the biggest bands of the 1970s. It truly gave you a sense of how interactive their songwriting and recording processes were.

8. The Post: We didn’t catch this until the summer outdoor movie season, but it was worth it to wait, since they asked Len Downie, a former editor of The Washington Post and a consultant to the film to come and introduce it at the Farragut Square (which sits only two blocks away from the White House and a couple more blocks from the newspaper’s offices) showing. The acting was stellar and it was great to see a counterpoint/companion film to All the President’s Men.

7. Mary Poppins Returns: It was hard to know where to place this one. I liked it, but didn’t love it, in part because I love the original. There were lots of homages to the Julie Andrews version, but this probably falls as far down as it does because it’s a musical and I have a hard time recalling any of the songs, let alone singing them. The acting was solid across the board, and Lin-Manuel’s accent, which drove me nuts in the previews, didn’t bother me during the movie. Also, I loved how colorful it was.

6. On the Basis of Sex: We just saw this last night as the first part of our New Year’s Eve movie extravaganza. A biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life between her first year of law school and arguing her first court case, which established the precedent for gender bias in federal law. Well acted, the film succeeds in making you love RBG even more. I’m going to see if the library has the documentary about her life that came out earlier this year and will also check out her autobiography. Also the costumes for the 15 years of the film were great.

5. Crazy Rich Asians: I hadn’t been especially excited by the book series when it came out, but the previews made me think this might be fun. It absolutely was, in part because so many of the characters are so over the top and in part because the setting (Singapore) is allowed equal billing to the actors. It inspired me to listen to the book and I’m looking forward to reading the second installment in the book trilogy and to watching the next movie. The soundtrack to this film is very good and surprisingly varied. Also, between her roles in this and Ocean’s 8, I will now investigate every film Aquafina stars in.

4. Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse: This was the final film of last night’s movies (The third film we saw, If Beale Street Could Talk, was one of those films that I can appreciate, but that I didn’t especially like.). I had such high hopes for this film that I was really afraid it wasn’t going to be able to live up to them, but it did. The voice actors did a great job, the writing was solid, they used visuals and sound to their best effect, and they did all that without taking itself overly seriously. Really quite well done.

3. Black Panther: I haven’t hidden the fact that I really enjoyed this Marvel action film when it came out back in February. It did a great job of portraying both Black characters and female characters as strong, multidimensional characters without sexualizing any of them (which is not to say they weren’t sexy), and it featured a villain you were honestly sad to see lose, which I think puts it shoulders above most action-adventure films. I would watch films about pretty much any of the characters portrayed.

2. Christopher Robin: What happens when the human boy from the Hundred Acre Wood moves away, gets older, and grows up? And when he’s about to lose everything? Winnie the Pooh to the rescue. This was an utterly sweet and charming film with surprisingly good and lifelike special effects bringing stuffed animals to life. It absolutely never veered into sentimentality even though it would have been easy to do.

1. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: This documentary about Mister Rogers was the exact antidote to 2018 we all needed. It showed how Fred Rogers came to be on television and a pioneer in child development and children’s programming, why he gave it up for a period of time, and why he came back to it. It also showed some of his shortcomings and how over time and through soul searching he mostly overcame them. I was already a big fan of his, but his hero status has been underscored of late by his advice to children that when there is a scary situation, they should look for the helpers because there always are some. 2018 was filled with stressful scenarios and, with a lack of national leadership, the sentiment (and its author) are well remembered.

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order):

• A Wrinkle in Time (this wasn’t the movie I wanted it to be, but it’s possible that even the movie I wanted wouldn’t have been the movie I wanted)
• Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
• Ralph Wrecks the Internet
• Love, Simon
• Ocean’s 8
• Juliet, Naked
• Paddington 2

The Best Netflix Original Movies I Saw This Year (also in no particular order)
(It didn’t seem fair to include streaming films in with big-screen and big-budget films, but also not truly fair to categorize them as television.)

• Dumplin’: Based on a book I loved, this is about a plus-sized Texas teen girl, who decides to enter the teen beauty pageant her mother runs in honor of her recently deceased aunt, who, she discovers, once wanted to enter it herself. Several other unlikely contenders also enter with her and they form an unlikely sisterhood with each other and with some of her aunt’s friends.
• To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: The letters a teen girl once wrote to each of the five boys she had had crushes on — including the longtime boyfriend of her older sister — somehow end up getting mailed and the main character has to come up with a plan for dealing with that. She decides her best course of action is to pretend to be dating one of them — but lines get blurred.
• The Christmas Chronicles: The first holiday season after the patriarch of a Christmas-loving family dies, his preteen daughter and teenage son accidentally mess up Santa’s Christmas Eve deliveries — and end up halfway across the country to boot. This was the best of this year’s streaming and network Christmas original programming, in large part thanks to Kurt Russell’s portrayal of Santa Claus. This is destined to be a holiday classic.

The 2018 film I’m most annoyed at myself for missing was The Hate U Give. It came out when I had volleyball on Tuesdays and Rudi and I had conflicts. I’m already on the holds list for the library copy of the dvd, which I hope arrives shortly after it’s released on the 22nd of this month.

What were your favorite films you saw in 2018?