It's a gray and very cool Sunday morning in the little northern city by the sea. The temperature is 56 degrees, which is supposed to be our high for the day, and showers are forecast for the afternoon. Perhaps I will regret having shut down the wood stove for the season.

I spent most of yesterday applying for a grant and working in the yard; and though I am unlikely to get the grant, the yard, at least, was worth the work. I made a quick trip to the nursery to buy a replacement hot-pepper plant, as mine seemed to have some sort of wasting disease, and I also bought a sweet fern for the shady backyard corner and a tall yellow yarrow for the sunny Parlor Bed. It was a good day for native plants, I guess. The sweet fern made me especially happy as this is a shrub I always look for in the woods. It has a beautiful leaf and a particular sweet odor when crushed; and when I was at Audubon day camp in middle school, our counselors told us that it was a natural insect repellent, so I would rub the leaves on my arms and neck and smell of sweet fern all day long, which made being 13 years old better than it usually was. (The mosquitoes were indifferent either way.) It was good to discover yesterday that sweet fern does fine in dry, poor soil, is extremely hardy in low temperatures, and spreads into clumps, all of which sounds perfect for my raggle-taggle backyard. Now I can be sentimental and sensible at the same time.

I suppose I'll do some housework this morning. You can see I'm not full of enthusiasm, but c'est la vie. However, T and I had some thought of having a Washington Avenue afternoon, which translates into (1) sharing a dozen raw oysters at The Shop and then (2) walking down the street to order poutine from the Duckfat Frites Shack and (3) eating said poutine at a table at Oxbow Brewing, where we are also drinking beer and playing cribbage and finally (4) going home and taking a late-afternoon nap. Frequently it also leads to (5) leftovers for dinner and (6) eating those leftovers on the couch while watching an old movie. 

It's been nice to have a semi-long weekend with T, though both of us have been working at our desks throughout. I've been messing around with poem revisions, which feels good; and I'm mostly ready for the conference, though finicky administrative stuff will continue to clog up my week: meetings with faculty, class website creation, posting materials, finalizing participant lists, that sort of thing. And then I'll be down the rabbit hole for five days.