Quarter to eight on a Sunday morning, and I am trying to come to grips with the realization that I should probably start wearing reading glasses. On the bright side I am drinking extremely good coffee in a quiet house. The woodstove is pecking and creaking mildly in the new heat, as is the parakeet, who is fidgeting in his seed dish. Outside a blue jay is screaming, no doubt at me, because I haven't yet carried out the scrap bucket or filled the birdfeeder. No, I'm still sitting here at the kitchen table, feeling grumpy about reading glasses, all styles of which make me look like Marian the Librarian in The Music Man in those dark days before she meets Robert Preston and throws off the shackles of books and glasses and becomes a babe.

Today will be housework day and hosting the teenage-rock-band-in-my-living-room day. I plan to do no writing at all, which is actually a good plan, I think, because having too much writing time can be as bad as having not enough. When I write too much, I start imagining that I'm turning into Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch--all lumpy and wrinkly and weak-shouldered and gassy and irritable, crouched over my dull papers as the beautiful vital world dances by.

Of course the beautiful world is not necessarily housework, which has become temporarily ridiculous now that one of the wand sections on my vacuum cleaner has self-destructed. Until a new one arrives by UPS, the vacuum cleaner remains exactly the right height for a hobbit, which I am not. Even my sons are now taller than hobbits. Anyway, you never hear about Bilbo vacuuming, only about his habit of dusting his mantlepiece every day, which, when I was a child, struck me as a strange time-wasting obsession. But then, in those days, I enjoyed curling up in chairs covered with cat fur and dropping pretzels between the sofa cushions and writing my name in dust and reading in terrible light. All of a sudden I am rather missing my sloppy youth--now that I am all grown up and in need of reading glasses.

Dinner tonight: fettucine with sauce bolognese, which I'd better stop writing about and start making or we won't be eating it after all.