The weather is strangely warm, and the trees are turning red and orange, and the skies are a brilliant blue, and possibly I am the only person in town wishing for a few days of rain. But I am worried about my shrub investment: they need a good soaking before the ground freezes, and they are beginning to look wan and peaked without it. Still, open windows and tea outside are a compensation.

Today will be another long editing session, punctuated by an errand to get my glasses tightened, and then Tom and I will have to move furniture to prepare for the electrician onslaught tomorrow. Task lights in the kitchen, new wiring in the living and dining rooms, outlets fixed in my study, new basement wiring, and probably more stuff that I'm not remembering . . . a big job, and it's going to be hard for me to do much of my own work while they're tearing up every room in the house. But it will be a relief to finally get most of this house up to code.

I'm still taking notes in my dream book, and the last two entries have been grim . . . lots of lost and/or unfed animals, crazy cruel people, and untenable situations. I'm looking forward to when my brain decides to be funny again.

On the other hand, I've been enjoying the pithy remarks of Robertson Davies in The Cunning Man, as in:

The relationship of the patient to Death is not by any means the same thing as the medical possibility of recovery.