Driving around today, running errands with my ten-year-old son. Along the way we picked apples, we listened to Apples in Stereo, we looked at pictures of hurricane damage on my Apple iBook.  Such strange coincidences. . . .

I've been bumbling up against melancholy lately, for no particular reason. The boys are back in school and I'm home alone for many hours of the day feeling like I should be writing better than I am. I keep cranking out the words, but they're clumsy and I don't care about them. It's hard to keep battering away, but writing is sort of like practicing scales: you just need to do it and do it and do it, and then one day you accidentally make music. Or that's what I keep telling myself.

I've been reading Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, a book I've always liked very much, and am discovering I don't like it as much this time through. Hardy has an odd generalizing "you know how women are" tone that is starting to irritate me. I mean, maybe we are like that, but on this reading I'm not in the mood to take his word for it. 

Dinner tonight: shark. (Remember, I was shopping with a ten-year-old boy.)