It's another cold morning, per usual, but fortunately I have a Big Warm Chuck purring romantically into my ear. He looks like a full-sized cat now, but he won't be a year old till May and he maintains his youthful outlook, by which I mean he is obsessed with stealing little pieces of kindling from the basket and then chasing them under the furniture, he reaches his paws up for a hug many times each a day, and he is constantly amazed by the lumps of snow that come inside on our boots.

As predicted, I spent most of yesterday scraping away at the editing stack, with a morning break for a walk and an afternoon break to pull together next week's high school plans. These editing deadlines dangle like thousand-pound Acme anvils over my head. So today will be much the same, except that my morning break will be a hustle up to the coffee shop to meet a poet and then later I've got to bake something or other for my evening writing group, fetch my CSA vegetable delivery, and probably do something else I can't recall just now.

This week, around the edges of my work life, I've been immersed in Adam Bede and George Eliot's dear, wise patience with error. Her sympathy is vast, though her narratives are inexorable. The terrible mistakes cannot be avoided. Tragedy crests like a river.

I forget if I mentioned that I have a reading up at Bowdoin College on Sunday, part of the town of Brunswick's annual Longfellow Days. I'll be at the Moulton Union at 1 p.m., along with the excellent poets Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and Mike Bove. I wonder what I'll be reading. I guess I'll figure that out on Saturday.