Sweetpea’s Garden

I’m a day late on this week’s three beautiful things, but as I noted in yesterday’s post, I wasn’t really in the right frame of mind. I can’t say for sure that I am in much better shape today, but I have my wallet, it isn’t raining, and I made it to work for my 10:00 a.m. meeting, so I’m gonna give it a go.

1. I got a surprise birthday present in the mail from my friend Heidi. It’s a gorgeous wooden bowl that smells like pine trees and for this reason reminds me of the cottage my family spent summers at while I was growing up. Inside the big shipping box, the gift box was wrapped in a lovely piece of green taffeta large enough to be a table cloth. Beauty upon beauty, with a cherry on top, this present was.

2. My former college roommate, Wendy, and her husband came to town to visit this past week. While their primary goal was visiting their new niece in Fredericksburg, we did get to spend some time catching up, along with another of our old roomies, Joanne, who lives here in DC. I’m not sure that Bob’s idea of a beautiful day was the three of us chattering away at a pre-baseball happy hour, but if it wasn’t, he was a good sport and didn’t let on.

3. Even though I posted about it already, that whole WaPo Express/DC Blogs double-header was a huge high point of my week and I’d be remiss to leave it off the list.

We seem to be heavily in the April showers phase of the month, so on a gray, damp Monday morning, here are three beautiful things from the past week:

1. I went to my first-ever knitting group meeting, the Dupont Circle Stitch-n-Bitch. Ordinarily, I am not much of a joiner, but sprite was going, so I decided to join her. The other knitters there were very welcoming and were working on some lovely projects. I got to witness a three-needle-bind off and play with a newly-finished hand-knit toy. (Knitting toys had never even occurred to me!)

2. On Thursday, I went to the Caps penultimate regular-season game with my brother. For the first time in years, DC actually looked like a hockey town, with a red-clad, sold-out crowd cheering the team to victory as they looked to clinch a playoff spot. On Saturday, that wish came true, along with the almost-too-surprising-too-believe Southeast Division championship, which capped the NHL’s most amazing mid-season turnaround. Let’s Go Caps!

3. I got up and — believe it or not — out of the house at a reasonable hour on Saturday and as a result, was able to run my errands and wander around the neighborhood on a truly lovely spring day. This was made all the more beautiful by the fact that Sunday was dreary in the extreme, so I ended up doubly-grateful that I spent so much time outside the day before.

I’m going to replace my typical three beautiful things list with a recap of what turned out to be a pretty busy weekend. Given that last week was, overall, fairly uneventful, my beautiful things (Post-marathon pancakes at Eastern Market! Free baseball tickets! Homespun yarn party!) were all from the weekend anyway.

I started out my Saturday a lot earlier than usual in order to go cheer on the National Marathon. (I woke up about the same time, actually, I just got moving a lot sooner — my Saturdays generally tend to involve very little activity before mid-day.) I met up with Julia and Michael around 8:30 and we wandered over to Lincoln Park to wait for our friend Phillip, who was running his first marathon, to run by, which he did around 9:15.

I didn’t get my camera up in to commemorate the moment until he was already past us, but here is his on his way toward the 15-mile mark. Phillip would be the one on the left with the gray and blue shirt, and the, um, fanny pack. He apparently wore his tourist costume for the race.

Continue reading ‘It’s No Wonder I’m Tired Today’