This is the apple pie I baked yesterday afternoon, the first apple pastry of the season, and I have to say that I am smug about its good looks. For reasons best known to itself, the crust behaved beautifully--no rips, no sticking--and the filling was tender but not soggy. (I dislike a gluey, flour-packed filling but I do like a pie I can slice.) Now, if I only knew how to center a photograph. . . .

It was a big kitchen day: in addition to the pie, I roasted a chicken and made gravy and a big corn and vegetable salad. Now we'll have cooked chicken to work with for a few days, and today I've got another round of tomatoes to simmer down into sauce, chard to prep for a tian, and lots of leftover apple pie. Seems like a reasonable start to September.

I need to run a few errands today, and I need to get back to my desk and look hard at some poems. Yesterday my friend Betsy dropped by with a present she'd bought for me as thanks for reading her manuscript . . . though all I had said to her afterward was "This is a great poetry collection! I have nothing to recommend! It's wonderful!" So I do feel as if I wasn't in fact all that helpful, though maybe praise is good enough on its own. It was a manuscript that didn't need me in the slightest. But Betsy brought me a present anyway.

The task did remind me that I ought to gird my loins and start looking at my own piles of uncollected poems. Do I want to make another book? I guess I do. Right now I just don't know how to get myself ready to start. Eventually, if the past is any indicator, I'll be seized with a sudden organizational idea and then I'll tear into the project. For now, though, submit submit is too weighty a chant. Ugh.