Minus 6 this morning. Brilliant sun, tree branches shifting and cracking in the cold, chickadees jostling with mourning doves at the feeder, a disgusted poodle, a greedy goat, and a giant old barn dog who refused to eat her breakfast. So I spent 20 minutes with my gloves off spoon-feeding the elderly Great Pyrenees, who eventually decided that maybe she could eat if I dipped a tiny amount of food out of the dish onto the ground so that she could slowly lick it up. This dog has always had unfathomable eating issues: "don't look at me while I'm eating," "I can't eat because you fed me ten and a half minutes earlier than you did yesterday," and so on. Today's old-lady snit was particularly irritating; but we persevered, breakfast was consumed, and I did not get frostbite.

And now I am sitting at my delightfully clean desk, ready to copy out the rest of chapter 14 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (in which he complains about Wordworth's Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"). Downstairs a pack of boys has emerged from James's room, no doubt preparing to reoccupy the living room while consuming five hundred or so pancakes. You wouldn't think this teeny-tiny house could hold so many boys, but we manage to pack them in somehow.