I would be happy to be sleeping better than I am, but I seem to be caught in one of my insomniac cycles. Oh, well. At least I can keep the fire alive in the wood stove while I'm uselessly ticking off mental to-do lists at 3 a.m.

Yesterday Teresa and I discussed Herbert's Mr. Cogito and geared up for our next big reading project, Tennyson's Idyls of the King. I finished reading Gay Talese's 1964 history of the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Staten Island and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which was more interesting than you might think. I read about a third of Lady Mary Wroth's seventeenth-century "A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love." I scribbled notes about the online class Teresa and I will be teaching in January. I worked on an editing project, and I tried to keep the house warm.

Today will be lumpier. This morning I need to clean for company. This afternoon, supposedly, the oven guy will save Thanksgiving, and a furnace guy will offer us yet another gruesome estimate. Or perhaps they will both be like the bat guy and never show up. I spent much time pondering these things while I was making my insomniac checklist. I also, for some reason, cared a lot about remembering to buy milk.