I just woke up from a dream in which I was trying to teach a class upstairs in my house, but the students kept asking for coffee, so I kept running downstairs to make it, and then some of them wanted tea, and then random people started showing up for the class, and then other random people just stood around and watched me rushing around trying to make drinks without offering to help, and meanwhile the clock was ticking away . . . Classic teacher anxiety dream right there. Blah.

But otherwise I slept well, cozy under my comforter as a light rain pattered on the roof. Today the showers will die away, and the sun will come out, and it will be a beautiful early fall Friday, tender and warm, with the scent of tea leaves rising from the damp soil. Maybe I'll even find another mushroom.

First, though, I have a bunch of niggly this-n-thats to do: class stuff, reading prep, and then I have got to deal with computer filing: my laptop is a mess of unfinished poems mixed in with unpublished mixed in with published mixed in with collected, and I need to sort that out.

Speaking of poems: my two newest ones were accepted for publication yesterday, which was cheering, and I did manage to float some others into various submission piles. I've gotten very bad at remembering to submit, but I made myself do it this week, and so far, so good with the responses.

The other thing I did yesterday was set up a new zoom studio situation in my study. For the past year and a half, after my study became Paul's bedroom, I've been zooming from the uncomfortable couch in the downstairs back room: using the TV as my zoom screen, borrowing Tom's tripod for the webcam, papers piled around me on the couch, wires everywhere, feet crushed under the furniture, struggling with bad lighting and awkward camera positioning. It's been adequate, but not good. Now I've worked out a new situation with a small webcam on the computer and a small microphone on the table (both of them offerings from my sons: I would never have thought to acquire either of them), simple wiring, access to my laptop and to a writing surface, and a more controllable lighting situation. It's still not perfect, but I think it will be a lot better.