Woke up to a power outage this morning, which accounts for my slight lateness in writing to you. But now the 21st-century American luxuries have returned: hot coffee in hand, fan whirring upstairs in the bedroom, freezer clonking ice into the tray.

It will be another hot day, so I should get myself up off the couch and do some weeding pronto. Yesterday Tom and I decided to work around the house in the morning and then go into town in the afternoon. So I emptied my backyard compost bins, tossed the semi-soil with last fall's leaf pile, and hosed everything down: a dirty, sweaty job, and a satisfying one. I have loved figuring out that, even in the city, there are beneficial and reasonably efficient ways to manage leaf and garden waste. My backyard planning is built around this annual influx of new base soil--all of which comes from my own maple trees, weeds, old peavines, deadheaded flowers, kale stems, and so on. Even a small plot can help take care of its own future.

Meanwhile, Tom spent the morning working on some chairs he's reconditioning--a set of six midcentury-modern dining-room chairs he bought off Craigslist. His plan is to repaint the metal frames and re-cover the seats. (The wooden backs are still in excellent shape.) So he was experimenting with spray paint, building a rough work stand to hold a chair while he paints it, and other such things.

After lunch, we drove downtown and went to the art museum and a used furniture store--you could call it an afternoon spent mulling over attractive objects that were out of our price range. Then we came home, and I watered the garden, and then I turned on the baseball game, and we drank beer and played cards, and I cooked Sichuan shrimp for dinner, and then we ate homemade cherry ice cream.

This date weekend has been pretty fun so far.