Three beautiful things from the week after my birthday:

1. I headed up to Politics and Prose on Monday for the American launch of Jasper Fforde’s new book, Early Riser. He was hilarious, as always, warning us that while all his previous books had taken approximately 120 days to write this one had taken 600. “Unfortunately, it is not six times better than my previous books.”

2. Rudi learned Sunday night that he’d been honored at his bicycle club’s annual meeting (which he’d had to miss because of his ski coaching obligations) with the Peter LeGrand Good Shepherd Award for being an outstanding ride leader. Apparently he was nominated by 14 members of the club for his weekly spring/summer ride and for being both fair and “a hardass.” (He leads a popular multi-level ride through northwest D.C. and nearby Maryland during the tail end of the evening rush hour, so he sets and enforces really strict rules about how participants should behave on the road.)

3. I was so caught up in the daffodil watch that I didn’t notice we’d had some other bulbs bloom in the neighborhood this week. (Heading to Georgetown this weekend to check out Book Hill…)

And a bonus, just because:

4. My (belated) birthday cake turned out great (I added a drop of food coloring to the filling to make it pink to play up the Valentine’s connection):

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