Week 28 / Summer Journal Week 3

Sometimes it's good to stand for a moment under the shade of the catalpa tree, inhale the nearby linden blossoms, and think of all the things I can still do amid all the stuff I can't this year.

I can walk two blocks from my house and stand on the bluff edge and catch the sunset.

I can ride my bike from my house, through the park and to the neighborhood where my friend lives and enjoy a beer on her covered patio during a brief rainstorm, followed by a rainbow and a breezy, beautiful ride home.

The next day, while Joel makes jambalaya, I can walk down the street to my friend's house to pick up fresh eggs and herbs.

I can enjoy a Friday night with a partner who entered my life twelve years ago pre-loaded with knowledge of my family's favorite card game, Spite and Malice.

I can picnic with friends in the park and complicatedly serve them this apricot and plum galette.

This was a nice week. It's usually at this point in the summer when I start panicking that it's all happening way too fast. But because of the way things are this year, with obligations feeling very low-key, I'm having flashbacks to the summers of my youth when I would lie on my bedroom floor and listen to the oldies station and wait for the DJ to play the song I requested. Or call my friend Kathleen at 11 a.m. each weekday as we watched All My Children over the phone. In other words, I'm finding time for whatever the heck I feel like doing, and the more pointless it is, the better.

Reading

One night after work, Joel and I rode our bikes around a cemetery. It was beautiful. The first tier was filled with the old headstones dating back to the late 1800s. We climbed two more tiers to the top where more recent graves, and a beautiful view of Spokane, are found. I used this bike trip to practice better breathing by inhaling only through my nose, and exhaling longer than I normally would, thinking about the things I read about in Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. I felt slightly less out of breath than normal during  those climbs due to a slightly more regulated heartbeat. I'm not saying I figured out the secret to everything, but it's been interesting to experiment with the different breathing techniques Nestor describes.

Making

I've been having all sorts of fun with low-tech methods for brainstorming, getting inspired and seeing work differently. On Friday I broke out the index cards to help me think about different marketing strategies. Later that night, I made a basic checklist of summer craft projects for wardrobe development and for gifts, and broke each project down into action steps. For the first time in months, daunting tasks felt doable, and I got excited to start new projects. It may have had something to do with Sharpie fumes, too.

I ordered a bunch of fabric for new tops, queued up a tote pattern, and got out my stash yarn and dreamed up an idea for socks, which required some gauge-testing on Saturday morning. By Saturday evening, I was well on my way on my latest sock venture. Doesn't this sound incredibly exciting?! I kid, but not really.

This will be a weird looking sock and I'm excited about it.

Recipes

As mentioned earlier, Joel made his jambalaya this week, which kind of made my week. On another night I made a potato and pea curry, and another night was chickpeas and tomatoes, both of which were good, good but not as good as the jambalaya. And on Saturday night was our picnic with friends, during which I went into all-out picnic mode: baguette, salted butter, fancy cheese, serrano ham, radishes, Castelvetrano olives, smoked brisket, potato chips, and that apricot galette, with rosé in our insulated wine bottle.

Watching

We fit small amounts of TV in this week, but my highlight was watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starring Danny Kaye, a childhood favorite on Prime right now. I remember wanting to be one of the Goldwyn Girls of that era, whose only roles were to model fashion and be pretty. But Danny Kaye really is one of my favorites, and I had never made the connection until now of how similar he is to Martin Short.

Listening

I've declared this live album by Joao Donato (one of the creators of bossa nova) to be my official summer album. Perfect for any day when the sun is out and you're transitioning from one state to another, say, from working to relaxing, or from cleaning up from breakfast to resuming your knitting. Spotify link: Live Jazz in Rio, Volume 1