Mid-August, H. and I bought a small 5th-wheeler camper trailer, 21 years old, decent condition for its age, decent price for its condition, etc. etc. We hauled it home and while I washed the interior and began to scheme the things I’d need to stock it, H. (who’s as handy as he’s handsome) pressure-washed the outside and began to go through the plumbing and wiring and so on to bring everything into good working order. Continue reading
It’s been a frustrating couple of days, concerning my computer and internet connection, which I kept losing. It’s a long and tedious story, neither interesting nor original, I’m sure, as we all have our frustrations, if not about technology, about something else that doesn’t work properly and requires endless diagnostics and time to straighten away. It’s been going on intermittently for some months, but at this very moment, post today’s visit to the Apple store to confirm that the problem is not my computer, and my most recent call to our internet provider and subsequent adjustments “on the other end,” all the bars in the little fan at the top of the computer are full. So here’s hoping.
There’s also been a comment from my daughter-in-law Dayna’s blog tumbling around in my mind, for which I’m grateful. Continue reading
I’d like to have my papers in order when I die. It’s about sparing my loved ones, of course. (Or is it actually to tidy me up? Didn’t our mothers say you should change your underwear, just in case you landed in an accident?) So I’ve been making periodic stabs this year at the journals, files, boxes of research, projects in their various stages. I got rid of that pile of index cards on which I traced the chronology of a man about whom I was tempted to write a biography (a better one than existed, I mean). I dumped a few folders of articles I’d clipped that, seriously, I will never use. I transcribed a year of diary.
Alexander Nevsky Monastery cemetery, St. Petersburg
Lately, the call to review and pare seems urgent. But sometimes I’ll be struck by the fear that thinking about death and acting in this anticipatory way is some kind of signal that it’s just around the corner. Continue reading
Borrowing Bones 