Volleyball is set to resume next week. Outside of seeing my parents and my friends, these games have been what I’ve missed most. I’ve played in various leagues and on various teams for nearly a decade down here, and going from what had been a twice-a-week schedule to not playing at all for over a year has been bad for me, both physically and mentally.

The group I’ll be playing with is most of the team that we played with last year. One teammate returned to Germany and another has (at least temporarily) relocated to Florida, but the rest of us are back. We play well together and I think we like each other, and our vibe is competitive but not at the expense of being supportive and having fun. I have played on and against teams that have lacked some or all of those values, and I’d rather give volleyball up than to play on them again. (I can stomach playing on non-competitive teams if the players support each other and enjoy playing, but it does get discouraging to keep losing. Those teams tend to shed players as the weeks go by, and then you end up losing because you can’t bring enough people to play in the final weeks.)

I’m putting a lot of pressure on volleyball to force me out of the apartment during daylight hours, to give me a reason to look forward to a day that isn’t Friday, and to get me out of my head so much. It’s possible it’s too much to ask of a rec league sport and eight teammates. But maybe it’s precisely the right ask. We won’t know until we meet at the net next week.

My invitation for a COVID shot just came through, so I’m booked for late Monday afternoon. I am very excited (and a little trepidatious, because I still hate doctors).

I don’t know that I can reward myself with another trip to the beach just yet, but I’m definitely going to get an ice cream cone (and maybe bring my own festive bandaid).

I’d hoped for this weekend to split 50-50 sun and rain, but it’s looking more and more like the rain will fall overnight and the days will dry out. Normally, that would be ideal, but I really need to get some cleaning done around the apartment and it’s hard to force myself to forego sunlight when I spend all my weekdays hunkered down over a computer.

So I’ll definitely get outside. The potatoes that are currently growing in my kitchen have thus far refused to plant themselves (although they’re doing really well without soil so far). I raced the clock down to the library the other evening to pick up the latest Sherry Thomas before my hold expired, so I currently am in possession of several books I’m excited about reading. It would be great to spend some time in the park reading. And I probably also should get some actual exercise in, since volleyball starts up in ten days and I’m feeling woefully out of shape.

But that does put some pressure on Rudi and me to get some cleaning done in the evenings. I heard officially this week I’ll be home full-time at least through Labor Day, and there’s some additional thought being given to what the workplace looks like when we do return after that. (The D.C. office space for my organization has closed, so we’re taking the opportunity to reassess realistically what our needs are after 18 months.) Neither Rudi nor I can continue to just pile stuff up, which has been our M.O. for months, so we need to come up with a plan of attack for moving forward and making our small space work while we remain here. Unfortunately, Rudi and I both exist relatively well in chaos, which leads to our living space currently looking like someone set off a bomb in here. Wish us luck with solving that.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. So many things you wanted as a kid turn out to be a let down. But you know what wasn’t disappointing? Cinnamon rolls in a can from Trader Joe’s for Easter breakfast, supplemented with holiday sprinkles from the cabinet. The can opened with a satisfying “pop!” and five rolls meant Rudi and I got two nights of desserts out of it, in addition to my breakfast.

2. Trader Joe’s has had my favorite Sumo oranges and work sent me a box of navel oranges, so we’ve been pleasantly awash in citrus.

3. Rudi got his first shot this week, and there’s hope I’ll be able to get mine later this month.

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

A couple years ago, Rudi and I found ourselves at the beach on a very breezy day. I didn’t think much of it and enjoyed the day for what it was, reading my library book as usual. Until we got to the end of the day and it was time to pack up, when I went to close my library book and found I couldn’t. So much sand had blown in between the pages as I’d read it that it no longer lay flat. I literally ended up pouring sand out of the plastic cover and shaking out each page before it even remotely resembled something I could return to the library in good faith.

So this week, when faced with a breezy forecast, I brought two books to the beach. One, An Unexpected Peril, was my current read, a new book of which I am the first reader of the library copy. There was a breeze, albeit a gentle one, so I opted to keep it in my bag. Instead, I started Silva Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, which I procured from a Little Free Library sometime in the last year. Set in Mexico in the 1920s, it focuses on a teen girl who accidentally frees a Mayan god from a locked trunk in her grandfather’s room and who then must help him on a quest in order to save her own life. So far, so good.

On the knitting front, I’m down to a handful of rows on my Smock Madness socks, so I decided to pull out Wohin?, the pair of socks I didn’t finish from Sock Madness 2020. I only made it halfway through the heel flap before the world started to shut down and with it my desire to knit. I’ve done nothing more than find the UFO, so I have no info on whether this is the right project to tackle next or not, but I figured I’d at least take a look.

Head to As Kat Knits for the weekly roundup of reading and crafting.

Say hello to my Winter 2021 Stripey Socks:

They were knit in Havirland Pax Socks in the Holiday Hangover colorway on US 1.5 dpns.

I started them in mid-January, finished knitting them in early March, and finally got around to weaving in the ends on Palm Sunday.

They are perfect for wearing to (but not really on) the beach on a bright spring day, and I love how happy they make me.