Bathrooms clean, surfaces dusted, floors mopped, sheets washed, driveway-ice broken . . . plus I lost a Scrabble game by 100 points. Lord, that boy is good. I have spawned a monster.

Today I'll be back in the poetry saddle: beginning work on a friend's manuscript, trying to sort out various event-scheduling issues, etc., etc. I'd like to think I'll be looking at my own new drafts too, but we'll see what the household bustle allows. I think both of the rough sonnets I produced over the weekend have potential, and one even feels as if it's reaching toward rhyme, but pursuing that thread will require a silence that I don't currently have access to. On top of everything else, I'm expecting a pack of electricians to show up any day now. After fixing the stove issue, they made a vague promise to reappear shortly and finish hooking up the kitchen wiring, replace the old wiring in the living and dining rooms, fix some outlet issues upstairs, and install new heavy-duty lines for the wood shop Tom will be building in the basement. In other words, Paul and I will be holed up in the back room for a day or two. I'd been hoping this all could have been done in the summer, when we would have left the house, opened all the windows, etc., but, unfortunately, this is where we're at.

For the moment, anyway, things are calm.