I’ve got no focused thoughts, so you’re just getting random tonight:

1. I just (just) finished reading a novel about the challenges of making friends as an adult, Serena Singh Flips the Script, and I think I might send a copy to a friend (whom I made as an adult) with whom I’ve fallen about of touch. (It’s my fault; she sent me an awesome snarky Christmas mug and it is my turn to reach out.)

2. I’m going to my first baseball game in a year and a half tomorrow. I’m excited. And also nervous. My current personal mask guidance is that I wear one in indoor public places (whether required or not) and on my wrist (to signal I’m a good citizen and happy to put one on if you are wearing one) outdoors. This feels like a reasonable course of action given our current knowledge base.

3. Friday, we’re heading up to visit my parents. I’m over the moon to see them, but I’m starting to feel anxious about leaving Corey. He will have a cat sitter stop by each day, but I know he’s used to being with us all the time and will be lonely. (He’s currently sprawled across my lap, with his nose tucked into my elbow.)

4. Karen and I are also planning to see each other, but we discovered our favorite lunch spot did not survive the pandemic. I am sad for the owners and employees, who were always very nice, even when we snuck in just before closing time and for the residents of the town, who’ve lost a solid mom and pop restaurant.

5. A girl (fine, middle-aged woman just like me) Rudi and I went to school with makes glass-centric jewelry, and I’ve been lucky enough over the years to own a couple of her necklaces. Today she was having a sale on her rings, and … I splurged. There is absolutely no reason why I needed a gigantic signature piece ring, except that it spoke to me. I had even nicknamed it.

6. My apartment is still a mess. I wonder how (if?) it will get clean(er) between now and when we leave.

7. One of my volleyball teammates is moving away after this week’s game. Another after next week’s. We had been a dozen in the beforetimes, and now we’ll be down to eight. My heart is breaking a little bit.

8. I told colleagues I’d sent two emails out last week — and while I certainly intended for both things to go out, the fact that they remained undone was eating at me. (One was just a head’s up email, but to some important people, and the other was to a designer who had another project I’d asked him to finish first, but still. That’s not the point.) I got one email out this morning and the other out tonight, and I feel much less guilty.

9. I buy flowers at Trader Joe’s because they aren’t horribly expensive and seeing them atop my fridge is good for my mental health. Sometimes they don’t do well (nearly all the spray roses I bought last week quickly dried up, but they were pretty in their crinkly, crackly form, too), but the purple puff mums I currently have make me very happy.

10. I saw this on Twitter earlier this week, and it spoke to me so much that I promptly burst into tears. I share it with you in case you also need to hear that you accomplished something really important over the past year:

11. Corey and I want to go snuggle up with Rudi, so it’s time to sing our adieux.

Good night!

With the winding down of all but one of my over-the-air tv shows (which wraps up in three weeks), I’m putting out my semi-annual appeal for recommended series to stream.

Shows we/I have enjoyed recently: The Equalizer, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Rebel, Teenage Bounty Hunters, Mr. Iglesias, Julie and the Phantoms, Haven, Life Is Murder, Punky Brewster, Stacked, Good Omens, Magnum, Miss Scarlet and the Duke, The Republic of Doyle, Frankie Drake Mysteries, His Dark Materials, and All Creatures Great and Small.

I don’t want anything that veers from mystery/detective show into thriller, I won’t bother with reality tv or dramas that get too soapy, and I prefer comedies that are kind. If you have a recommendation, please leave it in the comments.

Ultimately, tv watching is escapism for me. I want characters I’ll like and happy endings. (And if your gut instinct is to recommend Schitt’s Creek, you aren’t the first, but give me a midway point to start the series. If I like the characters I’ll keep going (and even go back to when they were horrible), but I’m not going to sit through two seasons just to maybe get to a point where I don’t hate them all.)

The Tour de France begins five weeks from today, which unless something drastic happens, my annual knitalong begins then, too.

I loved the shawl I made in 2020, after passing by the pattern at least twice. And I’ve loved other shawls I’ve knit as part of that knitalong. I don’t always rarely finish in the allotted time period, but at least they get done, as opposed to sweaters I’ve attempted to make. So, I think I’ll start now looking over shawl patterns I like and thinking about the yarn I own. That way I won’t spend the first couple days of the knitalong futzing around, mulling options and wasting precious knitting time.

Expect a couple posts about this in the meantime as I mull options. Part of the fun is getting folks to weigh in, even if I don’t promise to heed your advice. (Rudi absolutely did not love Reyna, but adores how it looks in the skein of yarn he’d given me the previous Christmas.)

We’re heading north at the end of the week (!!!), so a certain part of this weekend will be dedicated to tidying the apartment. I also need to do laundry.

I keep suggesting to Rudi that we should celebrate his birthday with some friends (he was out of town last Sunday), but so far nothing’s come of that. I’ll raise the point again.

I’d like to do some baking, but I’ll only do that if it actually gets warm enough in the apartment for me to let Rudi close the window and turn on the a/c. Tomorrow night it’s not supposed to drop below 70 outside (::whimper::), so that is a possibility. But the one perk of living below ground, particularly during the spring’s first heat wave, is that we’re insulated against the heat for a lot longer than other people. I have a love/hate relationship with a/c, so the longer I can go without turning it on, the happier I am. (Rudi, not so much.) But if I introduce heat inside the apartment (or the cleaning takes on its own heating element), it’s far more certain Rudi will draw the line.

Garden (literally, as in from my garden) salads are also on the agenda. I’ve been picking a couple bags of greens each week, but the impending heat is signaling the end of the arugula, at the very least. I’ve been really good about staying on top of bolting greens this year, but the temperatures have been on my side, and I may have to pick entire plants, rather than just plucking the largest leaves if the weather doesn’t cooperate. We’ve got a couple salad dressings we’re really grooving on from the farmers market (strawberry poppyseed and green goddess), which I find helps make the salads feel distinct from each other. When we get back from Connecticut, I might try the bakery’s housemade blue cheese dressing. I put in a couple hours in the garden this evening, but without any certainty of rain in the forecast, I’ll have to go water and pick snap peas and strawberries.

And otherwise, who knows? Maybe the park concert. Hopefully some knitting and reading.

How about you? What are you getting up to this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The scent reaches me before I see it: there’s honeysuckle climbing its way down the hill.

2. My midweek visit to the garden yields the first strawberries and snap peas of the season. Plus, I’m able to include vegetables I grew in two meals in a single day (greens in a lunch salad and rainbow chard with supper)

3. A colleague and I take one of our interns out for lunch to celebrate her graduation (and to meet her for the first time in person). We all hug.

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

I got through the heel of my sock during a conference call yesterday and am on to the foot. At least I think I am. I decreased the heel more than usual, so I need to try on the sock once the foot’s a little longer to make sure it doesn’t muck up the fit.

And I started two new books. On paper, it’s Sonya Lalli’s Serena Singh Flips the Script. Set in my neighborhood, it’s the story of a young woman figuring out how to find your people as an adult. I heard about it on my birthday weekend as part of an author event hosted by one of my local bookshops. So far, so good, which makes me happy, because one of her other titles has been in my audiobooks queue for a while.

And in my ears, it’s The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser about a middle-aged English woman who, after losing her marriage and her job in near proximity, discovers she’s inherited a great uncle’s Scottish house and library of first editions. It just so happens there’s a kind-hearted but curmudgeonly antiquarian bookseller in town…

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