I’m excited to have a full weekend at home after so much traveling. Here’s how I think I will spend it:

• Knitting: I am super far behind on my Sock Madness socks, which are supposed to be finished by next Saturday at noon for me to advance out of the qualifying round. I don’t know that that will happen, but it would be great if they were further along than they are now.
• Cleaning: The two things topping my weekend list are really opposed to each other. I cannot clean and knit at the same time, and the cat gets really grumpy when i tie a swiffer cloth to his belly and a duster to his tail. But, also, our apartment looks like a way station and things need to get put away.
• Doing laundry: Underwear is in a dire spot, and I have no clean sports clothes left. Plus, I have to go to a congressional briefing this week, so I should make sure I have something clean and unwrinkled for that. Also, laundry mountain could have an avalanche and suffocate us while we’re sleeping, so it’s good to be proactive about that. This will require going out to procure quarters.
• Reading: I have less than ten chapters left in my Inspector Gamache audiobook, and I can listen to that while doing other things.
• Paying some bills: This includes the mundane monthly items, but also sending our friend a check for baseball tickets and our garden our annual dues, which are both good kind of bill paying.
• Hitting up the local bookshop’s quarterly member sale: My brother gives us a gift card for the store, which sells both books and music, every Christmas. I don’t know that we need anything right now, but it’s fun to look.
• Stopping by the garden: I planted peas and spring greens a couple weeks ago and want to see if either have come up yet. And the violets, since daffodils, croci, and hyacinths are now blooming. Plus, I could probably throw some more peas in the ground.
• Going to the library: If I get going early in the morning, they’re accepting donations for the Friends’ sale for an hour, but I’m not convinced that will happen. But I also have some things to give back and a couple things to pick up, so even later in the day will work.
• Baking banana bread: To keep my colleagues from throwing away fruit at the end of the week, I told them to freeze any past-prime bananas and I’d recycle them into bread for the office. My coworker alerted me to the fact that an entire bag had accumulated while I’d been traveling, so now I need to follow through on my promise.
• Sleeping in: We lose an hour this weekend, so I should definitely try to stockpile zzz’s for the upcoming week. I know they say it doesn’t work that way, but I’m willing to believe scientists are just confused on this point.

What are you hoping to do this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. An earlier growing season in Florida means I can bring fresh strawberries home as a souvenir.

2. We got a chance to see a preview of The Way Back, Ben Affleck’s latest picture, this week. In it, Affleck plays an alcoholic construction worker and former high school basketball star, whose priest asks him to coach their school team. It’s not perfect, but it was both heartfelt and remarkably well acted. Recommended.

3. The beach. Always the beach.

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

March 1 is the first day of meteorological spring (as opposed to astronomical spring, which is the vernal equinox later in the month), and if this weekend is any indication, D.C. is skipping the lion part of the season I grew up with in New England and skipping right ahead to the lamb:

Are there signs of spring where you live?

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books with single-word titles. I figured I’d run through my Goodreads list and give you the books I’ve liked best with only a single moniker:

1. Summerland by Michael Chabon: This was the first book I reviewed here on the blog oh so many years ago. It’s a middle-grade book that combines folklore and baseball and maybe needs to be reread in the near future.
2. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick: Selnick is a master at combining art and words in unusual ways to tell a story, making middle-grade books that are doorstoppers but also simultaneously page-turners. This particular story tells seemingly parallel stories about disability and adventure in New York City.
3. Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell: Part Peter Pan, part A Little Princess, part Mary Poppins, this middle-grade book focuses on a little girl found floating in a cello case in the wake of a shipwreck, the kindly man who raises her, the system that wants her to conform to societal norms, and the Parisian waifs who help her pursue her dreams.
4. Landline by Rainbow Rowell: This is the Gen X book for longtime sweethearts, but maybe particularly for those of us who feel like we’ve been the steady, introverted, unexciting half of a couple for a long time. This is one of Rainbow’s two adult novels and sort of falls into what I (but maybe not strictly abiding by the literary definition of) magical realism.
5. Uprooted by Naomi Novik: This coming-of-age fairy tale (shelved sometimes as YA and sometimes for adults) talks about female friendship and reimagines what it is that we should really fear in the dark wood.
6. Booked by Kwame Alexander: In this middle-grade verse tour-de-force, Alexander gives us a boy who comes to love soccer and words equally.
7. Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: In this finale of The Illuminae Files space opera trilogy, all of our teen heroes (and our favorite formerly murderous AI spaceship) return to the place where the story began — a planet with an illegal mining operation where a gigantic militarized corporation has terrorized the population.
8. Savvy by Ingrid Law: In this middle-grade folklore story, everyone in this family develops a magical superpower (like the ability to open locks or direct rain) on or leading up to their 13th birthday. When on the eve of her birthday, a girl’s father is suddenly hospitalized, she must figure out how to channel what she assumes is her “savvy” to save him while keeping it a secret from those who might not understand what makes her so different.
9. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt: The first in The Tillerman Cycle, this decades-old middle-grade novel features a teen girl who must somehow ferry her three younger siblings from Connecticut, where their mother has abandoned them, to the South (I am surprised to discover that’s southern Maryland, about an hour from here, rather than Georgia), where the grandmother they’ve never met lives.
10. Ghost by Jason Reynolds: In the first of his four middle-grade Track novels, Reynolds introduces us to a troubled boy who excels at sprinting who happens onto a track team one afternoon. But he is being held back from success by his past and until he deals with those ghosts (with the help of his three new teammates and his ex-Olympian coach), he won’t be able to move forward.

How about you? What are the Madonna’s, Prince’s, and Beyoncé’s of your favorite reads?