Monday morning, here you are again.

I've got many things to do today, and some of them are even fun. But they are predicated on the fact that the other people I'll be seeing are on holiday while I still need to work. As a result, I'll be cramming my early hours with editing so that I can have a cup of tea with Lucy and a walk on the beach with Valerie before rushing out to the grocery store to shop for my sister's visit and then rushing home for a zoom poetry workshop.

Everything will be fine, and much will be enjoyable, but I'm overbooked this week, and one of these plates I'm spinning will surely crash. It will be interesting to see which one.

Still, I slept beautifully last night in my beautiful bed, and now I am drinking black coffee under a red lamp in my tidy living room, and I have a poem draft I like, and I concocted an excellent meal last night (seared Arctic char with ancho and lime; diced and roasted potatoes and carrots; a salad of greens, sliced beets, and roasted red grapes), and the cat did not get sprayed by a skunk. Yesterday Tom and I drove down to the Eastern Prom, near where we used to live in that apartment where I cried all the time, and we walked by the bay and then huffed our way up the hill and snaked among the rich-person streets. We saw a tugboat pulling a tanker, we saw an eider diving in the harbor, we saw toddlers in snowsuits, we saw a cute little tourist train, we saw shiny new office buildings, and we saw this: