Monday morning, another raw dawn. Outside it's raining, spitting snow. The furnace is growling, the cat is washing, Tom is in the shower, and I am compiling my grocery orders and juggling emails about various manuscripts and otherwise strapping my brain into weekday harness.

Tom spent all day yesterday digging and pouring gravel and placing firebrick, and now the middle of our backyard sports a strange contraption that looks like a shipping container but is actually the wooden form for the concrete that will be poured next weekend. Paul and I finished some housework. I baked bread and did some transplanting and reread the first series of Sonnets to Orpheus and made Venetian meatballs for dinner.

My desk is stacked high with editing, which is good but also tiring, as my ability to concentrate on that kind of close, fussy work wavers after a few hours. Copyediting cannot be a push-button, eight-hours-a-day job. It requires too much from the eyes. So I try to do the bulk of it in the mornings, and move to something less vision-rigorous as the day progresses.

Tonight we'll have tofu and Japanese noodles, along with whatever vegetables come in from my warehouse order--asparagus, maybe, or sautéed romaine. I'll keep reading Alice Munro's stories and keep copying out Blake's poems. I'm feeling slow this morning, although I went to bed early and slept  like a millstone and dreamed about a pure white room.

The weeks clamber forward. To no one's surprise, Paul's summer canoe job in Canada has been canceled. Another batch of readings and workshops has vanished. We're trying not to look over the edge of the cliff.