It rained all day yesterday, and all night, and now it is still raining--a slow, steady, inexorable rain, of the sort we haven't had since last spring. As a result, our family collapsed into a thorough holiday: naps and games and reading and idle chat, punctuated by a trip into town for oysters and poutine, and then the season's first fire in the wood stove. No shed building, the bare minimum of housework . . . it was an excellent day for underachievers.

Today T will go back to work, and I'll gird my loins for groceries and some actual housework, but P and I will probably still loll around together a fair amount. He departs at dawn tomorrow, and after that I'll really get back to business. I've got to pull together a syllabus for a Sunday-afternoon class, and dig into a new editing stack, and catch up with emails, and so on and so on. The usual looming stuff.

But here's some news: over the weekend I received an invitation to read in November at Warren Community College in northwestern New Jersey. The series is run by the poet BJ Ward, and it's got a long history of big-name features . . . Joyce Carol Oates, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Mary Karr, Stephen Dunn, Paul Muldoon . . . that sort of luminary. Needless to say, I'm thrilled. Transportation and timing will be a challenge, but I think I can overcome them. The event is a significantly big deal for me--I mean, an ample honorarium, a hotel room! Golly! I am so unaccustomed to this sort of thing.