Thanks to Jose, who keeps diddling in circles off the North Atlantic coast, a tropical breeze is whipping through the feathers of the honeylocust tree outside my bedroom window. Even the placid bay is choppy this morning.

Yesterday, at the "new" house, the furnace guy spent two hours removing "the most amount of soot I have ever seen in a furnace! Let me show you all the photos I took!" So I dutifully stood around admiring his photos of clogged pipes, heaps of crud, and so on. It was strangely reminiscent of the sewer-pipe video we saw during the house inspection.

On the bright side, however, the furnace seems to be in great shape, now that the clogs are unclogged. So maybe, despite our lack of insulation, we will have some hope of staying warm this winter.

My fat book about John Brown still has not arrived, so I have been driven to reading seed catalogs and long, doleful articles about North Korea. Oy.