More new books, salvaged from the remains of the book sale:

something in Japanese, I believe. I picked it out for the pictures. They�re pretty.
Copyediting, Karen Judd
Ancient Writing and Its Influences, Berthold Louis Ullman.

I also keep getting literary anthologies in the mail. Perks of teacherhood I suppose. Good thing, cause there ain�t many.

My shoes that I�m wearing are all wrong. They have excessively pointy toes and are all around quite narrow and uncomfortable plus they click clack when I walk. I like big comfortable shoes that make no sounds traveling across a marble floor. These mean pointy shoes have effectively thrown me off my game.

Only weeks away and everything will be different. I can start counting down this semester in weeks. Six, to be exact. No more students no more books no more students� dirty looks.

My brother Joe, poor dear, has mono. Mono is partially the reason I dropped out of high school. Miserable interminable illness. I don�t know how grownups can get on with their lives with it.

I feel zapped of all desire to write here. I just want to curl up with Basho on the floor in my living room and smoke and crochet and watch old episodes of Angel. In front of the space heater. With soup simmering away on the stove. And bread dough rising.

I looked at the maps of webby hiking trails north of town this weekend. I want to get actual paper copies of these maps and I want to put them up on my office walls so that I can keep track and remember. I am dreadful at both. I hiked 10 miles these last two days, which isn�t much, I know, but it felt good. I want to widen my scope here. I want to hike 20 miles each weekend. I want to spend the early mornings laboring through the wilderness. It�s good exercise. Good soulful exercise, I mean. I hate exercising, like going to the gym exercising. So boring. Like baths and sunbathing boring. I am easily bored, you see. Not a zen-like bone in my body. I need constant stimulation, constant sensory input. The gym and the bath always feel like sensory deprivation to me. Do not question this, accept it as fact (even if it doesn't make sense). But back to the point at hand. I find all the adventure I want from life outside in the woods with Basho running circles around me and all the overhanging trees and leaves and spiders and silky threads of spider webs catching on my clothes and the tiny spinners themselves scuttling up trees and into my hair. I find these things this place positively thrilling. I pitch great battles with my invisible foes in the forest. This is me in the forest. This is me, learning how to be peaceably alone, how to sweat myself into satisfaction. Life is good in the woods near the shining silver lake, in the predawn.

Life gets on my nerves when I refuse to get up with the alarm clock because I know it�s Monday and I don�t want it to be and then I�m barely on time to work and then come to find, 30 minutes before class when I finally consider planning the damned thing, that I left my textbook at home and so I run home and I hug Basho and then I can�t stop I sit on the floor with him and wonder how I could leave, how is it possible to leave and go There, the There I never want to be in. I finally do, but with so little time to spare that I never get round to planning class. I wing it. It goes fine. Whatever. I don�t care about that anymore. I care about going out into the woods and sitting among my tall stacks of books that don�t yet have homes and Miss Blue crawling out of her hiding room at all hours of the day now, creeping up to me, wary of the dog, but making progress.

And this too: Peter, of Bathsheba fame, called me up on Saturday and said do you have days off for Thanksgiving and I said yes and then there was a click and he said I just bought a plane ticket for you to come to Colorado. Find a dog-sitter, he said. I�m calling you back in two days to make sure you�ve got somebody, he said. Man of action, that one. I talked with Bathsheba on Sunday and confirmed that Peter did NOT, in fact, buy a plane ticket. But he did miraculously plant the idea in my head: I am going to Colorado for Thanksgiving. Frances and Jeff said they�d take Bash. So maybe I will.

Um um um What? It�s good, my life. I like. I like this record of my life far less than I like the act of living my days out. Could just be a phase. I�m a grouch. Forgive me. I am, also, starving. Forgot to bring food. Forgot to bring money. Sigh sigh sigh SIGH.