I had a bad night's sleep--uncomfortable from a sore hip and fractured by various cat/partner disruptions--and now I am blinky and slightly crabby and waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. Ah, well. Such is middle-aged life.

Outside, a bit of drizzle is filming the packed new snow. We're supposed to have rain and sleet all day, then another round of accumulating snow tomorrow night into Saturday. March is tearing into Maine full tilt.

Today I'll be working at my desk, until the movers show up to tote T's massive new photo printer up the stairs into his study. Then I'll be back at my desk again, and dreaming of going out to the salon to write tonight, if my lack of sleep doesn't suddenly nail me to the couch.

I had a zoom meeting yesterday evening with two writers, Meg Kearney and Catherine Parnell, about a conversation about writing we've agreed to record later this spring. It was just a brainstorming session: what to talk about, how to organize it, how to prep, and so on. Meanwhile, the house filled with the scent of the braised Moroccan lamb I'd hustled into the oven before our meeting, and I kept thinking to myself, How did I get here? It is still so hard for me to believe that I actually grew up to be a real writer, that I can sit around and talk with other real writers like an equal. I mean, it's crazy, really.

This spring I'll be recording that talk, teaching at Monson Arts, teaching a generative writing class for Maine Writers and Publishers, teaching a chapbook class for the Frost Place, teaching an epistolary poetry class for a Maine poet laureate project, helping to run a free community workshop with my writing salon, plus editing a biography, plus editing another book whose subject I don't know yet, plus working on poems for my next collection (thanks to an American Rescue Plan/NEA grant), plus prepping for the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, plus doing a close reading of John Donne's poems with Teresa Carson, plus flying to Chicago . . . plus gardening, plus housework, plus cooking, plus laundry, plus family. I am not even going to reread this paragraph. I might lose my mind.

But for the moment I am sitting still. So there's that.