It was a stressful workweek, with lots of deadlines and quick turnarounds and making sure the people who work for me were doing a better job with self-care than my boss and I were doing. But there is no way through such weeks but through…

And we did get through it and the organization didn’t burn to the ground and people did herculean amounts of work with my thanks and we all made it to Friday night relatively unscathed. Rudi and I toasted five o’clock with Filipino doughnuts that I’d ridden my bike through the midday heat to pick up. (Thank you, past me for ordering them!)

I marked the start of the weekend by picking up some holds from the library. Rudi and I went to the garden, sighed over the tomatoes that had disappeared from our plot (and the one that didn’t, but that now has a very large bite gone from it). We picked a foot-long cucumber and gave everything a good dousing.

We ate pizza and ice cream for dinner and watched episodes of The Librarians and Parks and Recreation.

Since I didn’t do a good job of it during the week, I’m going to continue this evening’s focus on self-care through the weekend. I’ll attempt to refind my living room, which is currently buried under my kitchen — which admittedly looks amazingly spacious with only the bare minimum in it from the fridge move yesterday.

I’ll order some more masks in fun designs and cute motifs, because these are the new universal fashion accessories and I’ve had to hand wash mine twice this week. I’ll go outside in the evening when it’s cooler and sit in the park. And maybe I will give making pasta a shot (in the kitchen, not in the park). It was on my list of things to work on while social distancing way back in March — a list that looks so painfully naive and optimistic all these months later.

But whatever I do, I will not be doing work.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Did I mention to you that after our air conditioning died our refrigerator also bit the dust? (The timing is not surprising; our fridge was old and refrigerators do not like being warm.) We were lucky because the freezer kept working, but we’ve been keeping our true perishables in our picnic cooler and also had a bag of ice in the fridge trying to keep from losing absolutely everything in it. Today, a new refrigerator arrived. We ordered (our landlord will pay for it) from a local company because they could get us the size we needed with only a week’s delay, rather than the month that absolutely everyone else quoted us. The delivery team showed up, wearing masks and gloves, within 15 minutes of the start of their delivery window, and had our old fridge out and the new one down the stairs and into our apartment in less than 20 minutes. I had a cold soda tonight to celebrate.

2. Rudi went out for supper last Friday with the political campaign he worked for this spring and I, after chatting with my folks and eking out any last light at the park on a clear evening, picked up a sandwich for supper from the local Greek restaurant. The owner and I chatted while I waited for my order and he said after a bad experience when the city first asked restaurants to do contact tracing, he’d been very pleased with everyone’s willingness to share their info. It was nice to chat with a longtime neighbor for a few minutes.

3. I got to buy period supplies and ibuprofen with my flex-spending card for the first time ever. One of the best things to come out of the COVID-19 situation is that feminine hygiene products and OTC pain meds are now allowable expenses for flexible spending accounts. I’m running out of time for that to be relevant to me, but I am so happy for younger people that Congress finally rectified this stupid, biased policy. Now if we can just get pads and tampons made tax-free nationwide and also provided free in prisons…

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

The unraveling is mostly only in my reading. In Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore, the main character suddenly starts experiencing years of her life in non-chronological fashion. In Livingston Girls by Briana Morgan (thanks, Jenn!), Rose’s new all-girls school turns out to be a little … witchier … than she expected. In Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez, Sal accidentally brings his dead mother back to life for a little while for a festive meal. And in Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed, Jamie and Maya are trying to figure out what their relationship is during the final, frantic days of a crucial local election.

On the sock front, I have turned a heel! Now I just need to pick up the stitches and we can start flying toe-ward! I’m looking forward to taking something off the needles finally!

Head over to As Kat Knits for more of what folks are crafting and reading.

Dad and I have been talking a lot about Harry Chapin recently. If you aren’t familiar with his songs (or just know “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which is the only song of his I remember hearing on the radio), you should check some out. He writes beautiful stories about people down on their luck and people who find love against the odds and people who live at the fringes (for better and for worse).

“Dance Band on the Titanic” is one of the songs of his that you can sing along with, even as we’re all thinking, “Please, God, S.O.S!”

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is top ten books that make me smile:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
3. Landline by Rainbow Rowell
4. Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy
5. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
6. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence
7. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman
8. Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
9. A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd
10. Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star

I’m a sucker for a happy ending and these ten all deliver in one way or another.

How about you? What books make you smile?