Home again, and it is downright chilly in the north: 52 degrees at the moment, a far cry from balmy NYC. Still, I'm glad to be here, though I can't say I'm glad to be up at 5 a.m. My sleep schedule was all thrown off in the city, as it always is, so I expect I'll be drowsy for the next few days as my body figures out how to readjust from bartender time to construction-worker time. Also my typing is terrible this morning. I believe I've had to correct every single word in this post.

But it is nice to be back in my own nest. I know I'll be spending the day with laundry and housework, and that's okay--it will be a way to ease myself back into routine after my dramatic few days away . . . big fancy dinner, big fancy baseball game, big fancy museum, big fancy bookstore, big fancy family news.

In the city I bought a pair of earrings for myself, and I bought two books for Tom and me. One is Pekka Hamalainen's Indigenous Continent, which I found at the storied Strand bookstore, and which I hope will be the continental history of Native America that T and I have been wanting to read. It starts pre-contact and covers all of North America, so it is a tome for sure, but seems to be reasonably well written and organized. The other book is Hanif Abdurraqib's A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, which I bought at my friends' hopping new record store on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. Abdurraqib is both a poet and an essayist, and I loved the book's opening salvo and am hoping it will all be as good.

As for the earrings, T admired them right away, a good sign.