How is it the last weekend of July already? Wasn’t it just March?

This workweek was so much better than last week in terms of stress and work-life balance, but I still seem to be fighting off exhaustion. So I’m going to try to take this weekend easy again:

• Buy cherries. Sours are already gone and I hear this is the last weekend for sweets.
• Find quarters. Did you know we’re having a nationwide coin shortage? So many businesses had already switched to a cash-free model during the pandemic and now I’m having a really hard time finding places where I can get quarters for laundry. A friend reminded me the Metro machines used to be a reliable source, so I’m going to give that a shot. I welcome any other ideas you may have, commenters.
• Do some online shopping. Maybe check out. Maybe just browser window shop.
• Finish my Smock Madness socks.
• Listen to baseball.
• Read.
• Make more ice cream. Maybe chocolate chip this time.
• Plant some more potatoes and beans. (I found another bag with sprouting potatoes in it when we cleaned the kitchen.)
• Send some mail.
• Back up my phone. (I don’t think I’ve done that this year.)
• Catch up on sleep.

What are you hoping your weekend will include?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. When I went down to the garden Sunday evening, the field was full of dragonflies glittering and glinting in the late day sun.

2. We have had several spectacular thunderstorms in the region this week. Some have been far enough away that we were simply able to keep an eye on the light show from afar, while others flashed and boomed and poured rain down on our neighborhood.

3. We took our lawn chairs, store-brand Cracker Jack, and shelled peanuts up to the park to listen to as much of the game as the Nationals and Yankees were able to cram in before the rain on Opening Day. I forget in the off-season how much knitting one can get done while listening to games on the radio! (I have mixed feelings about the decision to hold professional sport events, but apparently not enough to boycott them, at least at this stage.)

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

Look! I finished my Smock Madness gusset, so now I just have to knit a foot! Simple! It’s practically a full sock! (Well, maybe not. I wear size 11 shoes, so the foot is just as long as the leg. But still! More than halfway on the second sock!)

I shared with you last night my audiobooks, so tonight I figured I’d show you what I’m reading in print: Virginia Kantra’s Meg & Jo, a modern retelling of Little Women.

In this version, Marmee runs a goat farm in North Carolina. Mr. March is a former army chaplain who now runs support groups for returning soldiers. Meg is a former bank loan manager who now stays home with her toddlers, Daisy and D.J., while her husband John works at a car dealership for the Laurences.

Jo is in New York City, where she’s anonymously writing a food blog and making ends meet with a job as a prep cook in Chef Bhaer’s restaurant after having been downsized from her newspaper job.

But when Marmee gets sick, her two eldest children are going to have to take hard looks at what’s most important to them.

I’m halfway through and really enjoying it so far. All the key scenes are there, but altered, but our heroes remain themselves even though they communicate via text instead of post box in the hedge. But as we all know, the first half of Little Women is the easy part, so I’m steeling myself for a weepy weekend ahead.

Want to see what others are reading and crafting? Head over to As Kat Knits for her weekly Unraveled roundup.

I finished an audiobook last night, which means a new one was started while I was doing the dishes tonight. I’ve ended up with too many out at once, all of which expire in less than a week. I decided I’d start several of them to get a sense of which ones I like enough to want to keep going with, rather than either letting them expire untried or just requesting them again in the hopes of more opportune timing.

Tonight’s audiobook sample came from Field Notes on Love by Jennifer E. Smith, who specializes in y.a. romances told from both perspectives.

Also checked out to me in audio format are The Bride Test by Helen Hoang (which had reached a cringey moment the last time I had it out), Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (which Rudi and I are listening to intermittently after having enjoyed the small screen adaptation), Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert (a British romance I was enjoying that expired before I could listen to the last several chapters), How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (which I should probably just give up on in audio format in favor of print, since that tends to be my preferred way of processing non-memoir nonfiction), and The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (which will be what I sample during tomorrow night’s chores).

What are you listening to these days?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share the top ten book events or festivals we’d love to attend someday.

Who knew back when Jana set this topic that we’d all still be wishing to go anywhere?

Anyway, mine are all real:

1. BookExpo (I used to take part in a virtual version — Armchair BEA.)
2. Hay Festival (I have been to Hay on Wye on a normal day; I can’t begin to imagine it during a festival.)
3. Edinburgh International Book Festival (Scotland is on my list of places to visit, and this event coincides with the Edinburgh Festival and Edinburgh Fringe Festival.)
4. The Fforde Fiesta (The intermittent festival celebrating Jasper Fforde’s works held in Swindon, the real-world home of the fictitious Thursday Next.)
5. Shakespeare in the Park (this seems the easiest one to cross off my list once we’re allowed to gather in groups again)
6. YallFest/YallWest (I partook of YallStayHomeFest this spring and loved it.)
7. International Quidditch World Cup (Because don’t you just wonder…?)
8. Utah Shakespeare Festival (Oregon’s would also be great.)
9. Miami Book Fair (It’s the oldest book festival in the U.S. apparently. Who knew?)
10. The Youth Media Awards (Presented annually at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting, this breakfast is where you hear who’s won the biggest and most prestigious prizes in children’s and young adult literature. I went to several Midwinter meetings, but never managed to get to the YMA breakfast.)

How about you? Are there real-world or fictitious book events you’d like to be able to visit?

Today was National Ice Cream Day, which seemed the perfect opportunity to make some homemade ice cream.

I froze the bowl this morning and washed all the other parts of the ice cream maker. (It had been a while since we last used ours.) I bought cream. I read through the manual and recipe.

I remembered that in past occasions the ice cream maker has overflowed and set out a cookie sheet on the stove (outlets are at a premium in my kitchen, so things that need to be plugged in are often used on the stovetop) to hold the contraption and catch any overflow from seeping down into my burners.

I plugged in the base, pulled the bowl out of the freezer, added the blade and lid, and poured in milk, cream, and sugar. I turned it on, and the lid started to click past its stopping point. This was a problem.

With the lid off, I attempted to shift the blade and realized I’d made a tactical error: it was frozen in place. The liquids had already started to freeze, locking the blade where I’d put it. (I should have turned it on and then added the ingredients.) I rocked the blade out slowly (it’s plastic, so there was a good chance of breaking it in the process), and started to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a plastic scraper.

Eventually I got it to a point where I could get the blade back in, but couldn’t get the lid all the way down. Would that work? No — if the lid isn’t locked in place, the entire thing spins together, and the cream doesn’t churn.

More scraping, and eventually I got it to a spot where the lid nearly latched in place. No problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just hold it in place until it spins down enough to get it down that extra quarter inch.

This is the point in a sitcom where you at home in your comfy chair shake your head. Mishaps are about to ensue. An outside observer can see where things are about to go off the rails. The unwitting actor does not have the benefit of your wisdom.

I flipped the switch and pressed down on the lid.

The ice cream started to spin, but I was holding it down from above. Physics still exist, though, so the only thing not being held down started to spin — the cookie sheet the whole thing was sitting on. It crashed into the pepper mill and the milk pitcher and the tea kettle in quick succession. Realizing my mistake, I reached for the off button. But to do that, I let up slightly on the lid, and the base started to spin with the cookie sheet — and the off switch went out of sight.

In this moment, the only obvious thing that occurred to me was to pick up the entire contraption off the cookie sheet in an effort to find the switch.

“Help! Help!” I shrieked.

Rudi, who’d been taking a nap, stumbled in to find me holding this Exorcist device, and I, the cookie sheet, the stove, and everything in the vicinity (which he’d literally just scrubbed down earlier in the day) covered in cream.

We had very thin milkshakes to celebrate National Ice Cream Day instead.