Because there was still no usable sink at the house, I had nothing to do over there yesterday except to catch up on yardwork. So yardwork it was. The many maple leaves are now raked into heaps along the fencelines and into the front-yard garden beds, ready to spend a long winter decomposing into beautiful mulch. Why do gardeners bag up their leaves and get rid of them? That makes no sense to me at all.

I've been feeling a bit stupid lately, the result of general tiredness and a small head cold. I managed, for instance, to buy all the ingredients for chicken soup except for the chicken. I've been trying to combat my weariness with poem-copying: so after acquiring Philip Levine's Breath, I have transcribed a few poems, partly because my friend Teresa dislikes his work and I want to see whether or not I agree with her. I think I don't, but I'm not quite sure what I do think, and I'm also not quite sure if this is a good-enough book to use as an example, or maybe it's a great book and I'm just too trapped in my head-cold brain to recognize literary merit. Any of these things might be true, and I think my dim-witted sentence structure explicates the situation nicely.

I'm told that the sink is now fixed, so I guess I can go back to painting and caulking today. Trudge, trudge, trudge.