Baseball season is finally over. And now winter is looming. Long months till April, but wood-fires and lamplight are a solace.

Today will be another onslaught of rain, and the wind is supposed to kick up to gale-force again tonight. What a blustery season we're having. It's a good thing that Vita and I went shopping for Halloween candy yesterday. Otherwise, Tom and I would have nothing to snack on while trick-or-treaters aren't showing up at our dripping door.

Yesterday I hauled firewood, did some garden cleanup, raked, picked up sticks from the last windstorm. Today I'll be limited to inside tasks, mostly desk work, but maybe I'll make a pear pie too. I'm progressing with the editing, progressing with my poem draft; and I've got a lot of reading to do. A journal editor reached out to me yesterday, asking if I'd be interested in doing regular book reviews for their website. I'm thinking about it. I need another unpaid job like I need a spike in the head, but I still might say yes.

It was dim and cloudy all day, with an occasional overlay of raw drizzle. Nonetheless, Vita took her first shopping trip and came home with ham, bagels, and milk stout. Yard work was a different story: which is to say, I didn't do it because cold wet leaves equals cold wet gloves, and blah. Instead, I lit a fire and read Henry James and edited a manuscript and messed around with a poem. Without the lure of Vita, I would never have left the house. See how good she is for me?

I'm slowly, slowly working my way into The Ambassadors. Although apparently I'm halfway through the book, I still feel as if I've barely got a handle on the portentousness. Every half-smile, every slight nod is a moment of magnitude--or, at the very least, a glimpse of the abyss. It's maddening and also kind of like having a rash: every twitch is an itch. But of course I'm enjoying it too. Henry James drives me nuts but I love him anyway. His sentences are life forms, coiling across the page, stretching their antennae, hesitantly moving this way and that. I may not know why or where, but I delight in the syntactical animal.

I took Vita up to the cemetery yesterday afternoon, and we had a beautiful ride on the small roads among the plots. Now my legs are sore from using bike muscles I haven't really bothered with since I was 15. But that's good; and the uphill climbs are good too. Biking is so much better than running because the uphills are balanced with downhill coasts--a sweet reward, to feel the wind in my face and the street fly under me.

And I did manage to ship out another editing project, which leaves me (for the moment) with just one on my desk. Today I'll finish the vacuuming, and start editing the new manuscript, and, I hope, work on my Descartes draft. I'd like to do some yard cleanup and ride Vita, of course. Dinner tonight will be beef-noodle soup and warm apple-cabbage slaw. Then baseball . . . maybe the last game of the season, if the Astros win. I don't really have a dog in this race, but I'm finding myself leaning toward the Nats--not least for their fans' fine taste in impeachment.

Yesterday was rain and rain and rain, so I couldn't show Vita around the neighborhood. Today I should have better luck, as long as I can get my editing project finished in time.

And today is my younger son's birthday: 22 years old; tall and strong and bearded; sweet and funny and sorrowful; brilliant and driven, with a memory like a trap; a lover of small animals and, like his mother, an inveterate second-guesser of his own motives. I send him surprise and joy and so much love.

I wanted to let you know that my mother, Janice Miller Potter, has a new poetry collection out-- Thoreau's Umbrella, a verse biography. I've been reading it this weekend, along with Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers. I haven't yet finished James's The Ambassadors, though I'll get back to it. And Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec just showed up in the mail, so now that's in the pile too. So many books . . . so little shelf space . . .

I am now in proud possession of the first bike bought for me since I was in high school. That one was a cheesy imitation racing bike from Sears. Later I had my mother's cast-off Schwinn, but I hardly ever used it because it was heavy and too small; plus Harmony, land of speeding log trucks and pitted gravel roads, was a terrible place to ride a bike.

But now I have Vita! She is purple with black trim, a plain and basic bike for city riding, and I am smitten. I can't wait to get a basket for her: she is the kind of bike who will go on picnics and quick trips for bread at the market. I will ride all around the cemetery with her, and explore shady neighborhoods.

Unfortunately the used-bike shop (a fine emporium) did not have a bike in Tom's size, so he will need to keep checking back in as fall consignments arrive. In the meantime, I will get used to an activity I have not done much of since I was 15. And maybe, by the time he gets his, I'll be brave enough to venture out of the neighborhood.

Perhaps you are wondering why her name is Vita. Well, her brand is Specialized, and her model is Vita, and that word is painted right on her frame. A convenience in naming, certainly. But in adopting such an obvious monicker, I am, of course, nodding to Vita Sackville-West--novelist, blueblood, gardener, and lover of Virginia Woolf.

On gardening: “I like muddling things up." --Vita Sackville-West

Did a session of hard yoga, bought a cartload at the grocery store, mailed two loaves of banana bread to the college boy (he turns 22 on Monday), drove home, edited, worked on my Descartes project, fell asleep for an hour, made lasagna, watched some baseball, fell asleep again, woke up blessedly late, made some coffee, fed the cat, and here I am again.

Today I'm hoping we'll get a chance to go bike shopping. But it's supposed to pour rain all of tomorrow and I have lots of yard work to do, firewood to move, etc., so maybe the bikes will have to wait till next weekend.

I'm slowly, slowly catching up on my editing: I've had so much of it lately, and there's more waiting in the wings. Now I'm getting requests for some winter school gigs, at a site located an hour south of me. But Monson is more than two hours north of me, and I don't know how I can fit all of this driving into my days. I like teaching but I dread the driving, especially in bad weather. I've been meaning to design another teach-from-home 24PearlStreet class, maybe a shorter one this time, but I haven't figured out how to schedule it among all the rest. I guess this accounts for why I slept so much yesterday.

Ugh. That paragraph is a mess. Kind of like my calendar.

Anyway, today: Sticks, leaves, firewood, garden cleanup. Maybe a bike. I'll be happy to do nothing more than muddle.

I did do some writing yesterday, and I did use the trigger I'd bought in Chicago: of all things, a slim copy of Rene Descartes's treatise Rules for the Direction of the Mind (written by 1628, published in 1701). I am the world's worst philosopher. Under most circumstances I am actively repelled by the anti-physicality of philosophic prose, and my mind wanders off into distraction as soon as I bump up against those sentences. But I was at a used bookstore with my son: he was buying a book of Dali paintings and The Golden Bough; I was buying a Murdoch novel and . . . wait, what's this weird title? I dug out the slim tome and we peered at the cover. Well, I thought. I might be able to use a title like that. And so I bought it.

Rules is broken into 20-something sections, each of which opens with an abstract of the rule under consideration and then proceeds to horse around with not only/but alsos, ergos, and therefores. Yesterday I started copying out each rule, deleting the abstract nouns and adjectives and filling them in with gaudier talk. And after an hour or so, I found myself outlining a list of instructions titled "Rules for the Direction of the Chambermaid," most of which involve (1) how to figure out if your mistress is having an adulterous affair and (2) to whom you should be loyal (mistress, master, visiting lothario). Of course this is a silly project, and it will likely go nowhere, but inventing it is fun.