Thanks to last night's long, deep sleep, I have now returned to myself. Plus, I have a haircut, which is always cheering.

My band, Doughty Hill, will be opening for the Mallet Brothers tonight at a big farm-to-table dinner and rock show at Spruce Mill Farm in Dover-Foxcroft.  I've really been looking forward to this show but am now hoping that NOAA is completely wrong about its thunderstorm forecast. A wet violin is not a good thing.

Tomorrow, I plan to return to the Geoffrey Hill reading project, so anyone involved should mull over "Genesis" before then.

My son phoned me yesterday to tell me about reading Aristotle's Poetics, Plutarch's history of Caesar, and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex; and also to regale me with the exciting tale of accidentally auditioning in front of the dance collective and instantly getting cast in a student's senior dance project and feeling like "I'm not sure but maybe, just maybe, I could be good at this," which is exactly how I felt when Baron pulled me aside after a beginner's workshop and said, "You could be a poet." Immediately after I stopped talking to my son, my sister phoned me to say that she was in the middle of playing tennis when the florist delivered a monster bouquet of birthday flowers from me, and she felt like she'd just won the U.S. Open, and it was so lovely and thank you thank you thank you. It would be hard to beat such an enjoyable pair of phone calls.