Here's another less-than-accomplished photograph of a less-than-thrilling house event: the hanging of the bedroom closet door. There's no doorknob yet, as Tom is stripping paint off the brass lockset. But the door looks neat and sweet next to the blue sunrise sky craning over the kitchen-towel curtain and the enthusiastic begonia.

In order to whittle down our enormous record collection, Tom has asked me to go through all of my classical music LPs and decide whether or not I want to keep them. I acquired most of them as a child and teenager, so they have the sentimental power over me that such music does. It's true that a lot of them are cheap recordings played for years on stereos with blunt needles, so the quality is often poor. Still, Vivaldi double violin concertos remain exquisite, and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet is a beautiful bludgeon of melodrama. You'll cry, you'll laugh, you'll ask, ""Does enacting sex via symphony require five trombones and three sets of cymbals?" Apparently it does. (In other words, I'm keeping that record.)

This morning I pulled Merwin's collection Travels off my shelf, and I hope to spend some time with it today. I've got some fennel in the vegetable bin and need to decide how to prepare it. Raw in a salad or cooked in a main dish: that's the question. I should go for a walk and vacuum the floors. I should take the violin out of her case and experiment with the acoustic pre-amp setup I'm supposed to figure out before our next band practice. Mostly I should edit edit edit, and try to get rid of the sinus headache that's been plaguing me for days. Between this headache and its pal insomnia, I'm starting to feel borderline subhuman.