We're supposed to get a little snow today, but nothing much to speak of, which is good as I have to drive up to band practice this afternoon. It will be our final southern Maine practice session before Saturday's dress rehearsal and gig, and I've had to miss the past two because I've been teaching. So this snow had better not keep me down.

Yesterday I worked at my desk for most of the day, but I did get outside for a walk with my neighbor, and I did get a chance to mix up the new honey-vanilla frozen yogurt recipe I'd been wanting to try. For some reason, homemade frozen yogurt can be tricky--I think because the water content in the yogurt can get icy. But this recipe's got a bit of gelatin in it, and the result was velvety and delicious. Success, at least so far, though we'll see how it firms up overnight.

It's a dark morning here in the little northern city by the sea, and my thoughts are quiet, scattered. I'd like to spend time with my poem drafts this morning. I have to spend time with the editing project. I need to prep for band rehearsal. I need to read some of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnets so that I can talk about them with Teresa tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm absorbed in Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, which is a deeply sad tale that is really no tale at all--it's more like a bundle of photographs that are related to one another but only via the speaker's memory, experiences, or imagination, not because they necessarily intersect with one another. It's a painful book, so filled with sorrow and regret, yet extraordinarily vivid, and I can only read it in short bursts--a kind of self-protection, I suppose; ladling out the beautiful sadness in small doses.

Otherwise, what am I doing? what am I here for? what matters? I am watching the small birds move through the bare trees and shrubberies. I am sweeping the dirt from the floors. I am carrying a cup of coffee upstairs to my beloved. I am trembling like a human being in a small bubble of self-doubt and foreboding, which is also a small bubble of everyday sweetness. It is the same old story.