Whoops! This didn’t post last night. Anyway…

As we were walking home from the pool and the garden this afternoon, we noticed the storm clouds overtaking the sun in a dramatic fashion. This is taken from Massachusetts looking west over Embassy Row.

Within 20 minutes, the winds were approaching gale force and sheets of water were pouring from the sky, obscuring the buildings across the road from us, with loud cracks of thunder overhead. It was a delightful time to be inside, and I truly appreciated our cozy Burrow.

Rudi and I started off our weekend well with a surprising text from friends who were home and wondering if we wanted to see a film. We watched Echoes in the Canyon, a documentary by and starring Jakob Dylan about the early days of the music scene in Laurel Canyon in L.A., and then went out for drinks to catch up. It was a nice way to begin the weekend, and I hope it will continue pleasantly and include some of the following:

• Swimming.
• Watching the Tour de France and knitting. (More details on the latter tomorrow.)
• Following the World Cup final. I caught some of the opening round matches, so I think it might be okay if I watch Sunday’s, but if they start doing poorly, clearly I’ll have to abort the plan.
• Working on some job hunt-related things.
• Baking.
• Doing laundry.
• Planting beans and harvesting mint in the garden.
• Drinking home-brewed iced tea (Our current flavor is Hibiscus Raspberry Currant) in Arnold Palmers and maybe making daiquiris.
• Dancing to upbeat music. (I don’t do this often enough.)
• Phoning a couple friends to mark major life events.

How about you? What do you hope your weekend will hold?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I’ve probably said this before, but I love seeing superhero movies on opening weekend, because there is an incredible vibe in the theater from people who love the genre and the format and who can’t wait to find out what this story holds for them. It’s like a communal form of reading. We caught Spiderman: Far from Home on Tuesday night at the Uptown and while it wasn’t a sold-out crowd, there were a lot of people there. And you could just tell that we were all excited to find out where Marvel was going to take us in our next adventures. This iteration of Spiderman is a sweet one and this was no exception, with Peter and his classmates off on a European summer trip in which Peter plans a romantic scenario to let M.J. know he’s in love with her. We aww’ed and we buzzed and we gasped at all the appropriate moments and generally left the theater pleased with the movie and our time together.

2. Like many cities, D.C. used to have a system of streetcars to transport people around the area. Dupont Circle was home to its only underground station, built in in 1949 and used for the next 13 years until the streetcars were taken offline in favor of buses. The station spent the next decade or so as a bomb shelter, but then was abandoned until the 1990s, when a developer — obviously a guy — thought a creepy underground murder tunnel would make an excellent food court. Unsurprisingly, it failed in spectacular fashion and remained boarded up and derelict until a couple years back, when it was turned into the occasional arts space. Friday morning, Rudi and I got our first chance to attend a free event there, and we were not disappointed with the ambience, which felt like a throwback to the slightly grittier neighborhood we’d moved into.

3. Yesterday I stopped by another local farmers market to return the flat and pint containers our cherries had come in to the farmer. They were selling delicious peach lemonade, which I enjoyed while walking to the pool.

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

I didn’t knit at all this week. Mostly, I didn’t even take it with me. But the Tour de France (and its associated knitalong) starts up on Saturday, so I have been doing a lot of mulling over of patterns. A new shawl may be in the works come this time next week! Or, you know, something else entirely.

I did, however, read. And because I read, I took books back to the library and brought home new ones, including Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue, which I started today in honor of the Fourth of July. It’s about the first female president’s son, who causes an international incident with an heir to the throne in a $75,000 scuffle at a Royal Wedding. I am entranced with both Alex and Henry and if I resurfaced for air after a kiss in the Rose Garden, well, let’s say it was just so I didn’t stay up all night reading straight through.

I’m also reading the Austen-inspired, Indian-American-centric Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev and listening to Daisy Jones & The Six, which read by a full cast (including some well-known voices) and which is the book equivalent of a Behind the Scenes special about a 1970s pop star and her band. It’s excellent help at distracting me while pitting a seemingly endless supply of cherries at the kitchen sink.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what people who’ve actually been crafting this week have been working on.

Twilight
   ~Elfrida De Renne Barrow

Circled
To completion,
Dove-winged, the day pauses,
Fluttering along the star-edges
Of night.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl asks for ten of our favorite childhood books, which I took to mean books I read up through elementary school:

1. Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss (While I love the message of this book and credit it for being a cornerstone of my beliefs in empathy and using your voice and collective action, I also acknowledge that Seuss has a problematic relationship with race in some of his books.)
2. Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham (My approach to insects indoors dates to this book. I can vaguely recall a time where I’d screech for my parents to come kill any spider I came across as a little kid, so I’m guessing that may be where this book’s arrival in my life came from. Since reading it, though, I tolerate many types of insects living in the corners of my apartment — there’s a spider in the bathroom as we speak — although I admit it’s an unequal system that’s biased against mosquitoes, wool moths, ants, flies, and cockroaches, in part because of their ability to wreak havoc and in part because of their tendency to show up in spring-break in Florida quantities if allowed to stay.)
3. Richard Scarry’s Please and Thank You Book (Honestly, I have no idea why. I have never given this book as a baby shower gift, although it is still in print.)
4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (I have mentioned before that when my town was building a new, modern library, they sent a librarian around to my school to encourage us to get a library card when they opened. She came a couple of times, reading us a chapter of this book at a time. It worked. I got a library card — and copies of the first three books in the series for Christmas.)
5. Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parrish (Yet another book I was introduced to in school, this time by our second-grade teachers who would pull both classes into one room — this literally meant sharing desk chairs — and read one of the books in this series aloud to us periodically. If you don’t know it, it features a very literal-minded housekeeper and her upper-crust employers who are prone to ask her to draw the drapes or dress the chicken while they’re out only to return to artwork or their dinner still raw but suited up. This is a silly children’s series for people who love the power of words.)
6. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (My maternal grandmother took this out of the library to preview whether it was suitable for me and I found it and started reading it. She quickly returned it to the library, so she could buy me a copy for my birthday, and took out A Little Princess instead in an attempt to derail my interest, but I was hooked and grabbed my library’s copy to finish it. Not to worry, I’ve read this copy many times since then.
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Also, Eight Cousins. I read both dozens of times. None of the other four books in the Alcott collection I have (one of my favorite gifts ever from my paternal grandparents) come anywhere close. Maybe it’s time for a reread.)
8. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (This is the book that made me a book buyer. I received this copy as a gift for Christmas. (We got book plates that same year and I clearly recognized how nice a book this was, because I convinced my brother to trade me one of his color bookplates for one of my black-and-sepia ones just to use in it.) But I bought the rest of the series, and some of her other titles one at a time at Walden Books in the mall.)
9. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (I loved Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace and Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit. And then I loved Vicky and Poly and Canon Tallis.)
10. Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene (This is the first of the Nancy Drew books and while it’s probably not my favorite (I preferred the George and Bess books, rather than the Helen ones), it’s the one that made me a mystery reader. I think my mother gave me the first five books for Christmas one year (the 1960s edits, rather than the 1930s originals) and then I took off from there. I read them quickly and then tore through every copy I could get my hands on from our library. I even read some of contemporary The Nancy Drew Files series that came out when I was in middle school.)
11. Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion by Julie Campbell (I’m guessing this was another gift from my folks, because I owned a bunch of them, and I don’t know that I would have bought any of them myself without having read the first one, and this wasn’t a series my library carried. While I liked Nancy Drew, I related to Trixie, who had siblings, chores, and a more realistic life.)

Oops. I ended up with 11, but with a lifetime of book love, that seems a reasonable number