Things on my radar for this weekend:

• Finish reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
• Play volleyball
• Go on a Lewis Carroll-themed scavenger hunt with friends
• Cook quince
• Do laundry
• Clean the kitchen
• Find where the Goodwill stuff has migrated to and get it out of the apartment
• Drop off donations for Toys for Tots
• Knit
• Finalize some plans with friends

What are you hoping to get around to this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We’ve hit playoffs in both volleyball leagues, and with my team tonight, the list of available players shrank rapidly until I was down to four. The bad news is that that league sets the mandatory minimum at five players. So the other team would have been within their rights to call us on it and to force us to forfeit the game. But they didn’t. They said we could play with our four against their full team and they’d abide by the outcome, which was tremendously decent.

2. Our friends invite us to a Halloween party, our first in years. We don’t stay for long, but I’m so glad we went for a little while.

3. New Christmas music has started coming out. I’m mostly playing it after Rudi goes to bed so it doesn’t annoy him too much, but it feels good to be working on this year’s mix already, particularly since the last couple have come down to the wire.

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

D.C. is an interesting place, because while there is an airport just over the river, less than five miles away from my apartment, there’s also generally a no-fly zone over much of the city. This means it’s rare we see airplanes overhead (and it can cause panic when they do occasionally have to approach over the city because of the wind).

But we do have periods when we have helicopters circling overhead at low altitudes. Inaugurations, for instance. Massive protests. Increased times of security threats. For much of Trump’s presidency, it seemed like he had helicopters keeping an eye on things. (That may be an exaggeration, but he definitely had more than Obama or W or Biden.)

And other times, like tonight, you just have to turn to Twitter to ask if anyone knows. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and it’ll be someone you’re friends with info. But other times, you just have to turn to the Twitter accounts that specialize in local helicopter circling or copter spotting in the hopes that info will let you focus on other things, such as sleep.

I’m starting to think ahead to winter. It’s the season I spend the most time alone (the perils of living with a ski coach) and it’s dark and cold and people don’t like to leave their houses to hang out.

Which means I have a challenging dozen weeks from January until mid-March.

I’ll have volleyball, of course. I suspect the team will play on Tuesdays, but I’ll try to add a Thursday night option, as well, to correspond with Rudi’s being away. Or I could add another sport, but I don’t know that my knees are excited about the running involved in soccer or basketball.

I could start a game night. Rudi likes games well enough, but not enough, I don’t think, that he’ll feel bad if I have folks over to play. That will require finding people who like playing games or maybe seeing if the Board Room or Labyrinth have a meetup.

I’m mulling a hot chocolate quest, to identify the best purveyor in the District. That should bring some of my friends out with me.

The library or one of the local bookshops might have a book group. I haven’t tried one in ages.

Or maybe one of the local yarn shops has an open knit night.

Any other ideas for getting out of the house (or getting other people into it) during the winter months?

(Oh, and if you’re looking for the answer for what I was for Halloween, Karen was correct, and I was a blue jay.)

This is my Halloween costume, which, it turns out, was harder for everyone to guess than I expected it to be. I’ll let you guys guess in the comments and fill you in on the right answer tomorrow. I will say that anything below the skirt is irrelevant to the costume. (I played volleyball in a prototype of the costume, which had a different shirt (same letter) and a sort-of makeshift blue long-sleeve shrug over it Thursday night, because I needed things that would stay put while I moved around the court.)

It was a drizzly evening in D.C., which meant we had a relatively uneventful night on the stoop with our bucket of candy, holiday playlist, and jack o’lanterns. We did see a few small people, several dogs who were disappointed our available treats did not include biscuits, and a bunch of college-aged kids, many of whom were international students celebrating their first Halloween. Best group costume went to a group of girls dressed as m&m’s.

I hope you had a nice holiday!