I was walking to Trader Joe’s to pick up some pizza dough just as the sun was setting. It was lovely:

I decided at some past Olympics that it seemed only fitting to celebrate Opening and Closing Ceremonies with a nod to the host nation.

With this year’s Olympics being held in Tokyo, that means Japanese, and D.C. did not leave me hanging. About eight blocks away from the Burrow is Hana Market, a tiny Japanese grocery (and one-time tourism agency). After work let out, I wandered over to pick up snacks to eat during tonight’s broadcast. While I have been to Hana before, it’s either been to pick up a specific ingredient or to buy a mochi to snack on. This time I took a less strategic approach and just picked up things that looked interesting.

I came home with a bag of supplies, including:

Peach caramel corn pops, seasoned seaweed, coffee-flavored black sesame candy (I missed the fact that they were coffee), matcha Kit Kats, chocolate stumps, roasted bean snacks, and chestnut mochi served as appetizers.

Mango creamy soda, which contains 0% juice, but does contain milk. I’d buy it again.

We paused in our corner-store delights to have some actual dinner, picked up from the nearby Japanese restaurant, Sakana, that we’d never been to. Rudi ordered a roll and a sushi bento. While I considered an entree, I’ve rarely been to a Japanese restaurant that offered an entire section of vegetarian sushi/maki, and that won out in the end:

The roll at the top is tempura vegetables. The one on the right is ume shiso, or pickled plum. The one at the bottom left is kanpyo, or dried gourd. All three were delicious.

And then for dessert, Rudi and I split these two red bean paste mochis, a favorite of mine.

That’s a pretty good feast, wouldn’t you say?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We have dinner with friends we haven’t seen since before the pandemic began.

2. The laundry machine company fixes the washing machine before I run out of clean clothes.

3. While the reason for it isn’t beautiful (particulate matter from the wildfires across the country), the neon red of the sunset on Monday was stunning.

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

This evening, I took my book out with me, rather than my knitting, and sat on the local Greek restaurant’s patio with a cup of tea. (Bars might have reopened, but few of the coffeehouses near me have resumed evening hours. Even the Starbucks on the Circle closes at 8 these days.)

I’m far enough into the book at this point to be invested in the characters, so I expect it to go quickly from here on.

The Olympics kick off the evening after tomorrow, so I expect that’s when knitting will begin again in earnest. After all, I should be able to finish a smallish project within two multi-week sporting events, right?

It’s been a few months since I’ve written one of these posts, but here’s what’s going on around here right now:

Hearing: I turned the a/c off for a few minutes because it keeps giving us an error message. So I can hear the fan whirring in the bedroom and the low melody of Rudi’s music (although it’s too quiet for me to tell what song is playing).

Feeling: Warm. The tightness of a tension headache coming on. Tired. The softness of the cat as he bumped against my foot. (He’s curled up on my flip flops.)

Seeing: A pile of clean beach towels. (The washing machine got fixed today! Hooray!) A pile of dirty clothes that need to be washed. My organizer not quite closed. A cat who got up after I wrote that last bit and is now staring at me in the hopes that I will fill his empty bowl.

Tasting: Nothing right now, but in a minute, the minty burn of toothpaste.

Smelling: The new laundry detergent Rudi used.

Give us a sense of what it’s like where you are.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks about books that should be read in a single sitting. Here are ten titles that I either did that with, or where it feels that way in retrospect:

1. Any of the Harry Potter books
2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
3. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
4. The Illuminae Files by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
5. The Tea Dragon Society by Katie O’Neill (it is a picture book)
6. Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
7. If God Invented Baseball by E. Ethelbert Miller
8. The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
9. Booked by Alexander Kwame
10. Trouble Makes a Comeback by Stephanie Tromly

How about you? Are there any books that you’ve just absolutely torn through?