Kind of a bad sleeping night, but oh well. I'm up now, and feeling fine, and if I crash this afternoon, let's hope it happens after I teach my class.

I did spend a lot of time outside yesterday, mostly working on that brush pile, and I hung out a load of clothes as well. The brush pile is the detritus from the two junk maples that Tom and Paul took down last fall: a pair of accidental saplings that had taken hold between our shed and the neighbor's garage and were trouble-in-waiting. As trees, they were leggy and inconsequential, but they still made quite a pile of brush. All of it has to be cut up and bagged for the city's yard-waste collection, not to mention that it's sitting right where I need to rake the leaf mulch I'll be composting for next fall's soil-enrichment projects. I should finish the bulk of the stick chore by the end of the week, and then maybe I can do the more fun work of cleaning out flowerbeds. The temperature is supposed to drop again by the weekend, so I can't get too cocksure about spring. But the tough little bulbs are eager for sunlight.

This morning I'll struggle through my 8 a.m. exercise class, and then I'll turn my attention to manuscript organization. Yesterday I printed out a stack of newer finished poems, and today I want to spread everything out on the dining-room table and start figuring out what to add to and delete from the existing ms. I'll hang another load of clothes on the outside lines, and maybe I'll find some time to work on the stick pile before I check in with my high schoolers. We'll be looking at poems by Ross Gay and Layli Long Soldier and playing with approaches to the poetic sentence. I'll let you know how it goes.