I've been reading Jane Austen's Emma and Adrienne Rich's Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law as well as a long New Yorker article about the lifelong boringness of Chancellor Angela Merkel, all of which is beginning to accrue into a murky, sleety, women-in-history brain mist rather akin to the crappy weather of central Maine. This is probably very useful for my poem under construction, but I wouldn't mind a little sunshine. (And don't assume that Emma is a ray of light in a cloudy sky. Austen's novels are always expositions of cruelty. Why don't people talk more about this interesting meanness instead of pretending the books are romantic screenplays?)

Unfortunately, Tom has just informed me that the aforesaid crappy weather is scheduled to rear up again on Saturday, when my band is supposed to be opening for the Old Blues Kats at the East Sangerville Grange. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Now that we're a trio instead of a quartet, we've been working and reworking on our sound, with (as radio announcer Joe Castiglione says about the Red Sox) "good success." So if we can't play this weekend, we'll all be glum.

In other news: Ruckus has just bounced up onto my desk and is excitedly licking up the dregs of coffee in my cup. This cannot end well.