Hello dearest. Up in the aerie with rapidly melting ice filled glass of rosé. Perspiring in this torpid heat and after a flurry of food prep - a blueberry-yogurt cake is baking in the oven. I have the car for a couple of days which is really nice. So I went for a walk in the morning, then hit farmstands and did a supermarket food shopping. Then I collapsed for a short nap with my resumed Brenda Wineapple Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson volume. Woke up feeling revitalized so I set to washing, trimming and putting away the produce, playing sous-chef to myself in advance of rather more fun (or at least showey) cooking tomorrow. I enjoyed having this mountain of work to get through - and getting through it. I like working in bursts like this. I've also decided that I like cooking and baking much more than I do gardening. It's much less physically taxing and whatever needs to be done I can have a miniseries on in the background - currently, Damages, Season 3 - not loving it. Next in Netflix cue is Mad Men Season 3 - that I'll be all over. After that will be some season of True Blood that most everybody's seen already but will be news to me.

Spent a lot of time today thinking about the concept of the "ambivalent man" that I got introduced to via Dominique Browning's memoir. A penny has dropped. I get it now. It's the conceptual framework I needed. Explains a lot - more than one guy. Problem for me is, what do I do with this newfound perspective? Well, for the moment, just do what I do.

In other news, (1) D working several towns away which the cats evidently sensed, thus after my morning shower gifting me right in front of the kitchen sink with a deceased mouse. I screamed and carried on, which absolutely no-one heard because neighbors on one side are in the city, and neighbor on the other was on his tractor-mower which is so noisy that he had on earmuffs of sorts. I went to the woodshed and selected my implement - a pointed shovel, not the most efficacious implement but amongst shovels the one with the longest handle. Then there was the complete freak-out endeavor of trying to get at the corpse - which I wasn't entirely convinced was a corpse, and might be playing dead. No, it was in rigor mortis, and somehow unlike the poor mouse I survived the earthly ordeal of scooping it up and dumping it into the weeds.

(2) Am I really to believe that people accidentally land on my site by googling "did Sages Ravine, MA have a tornado on July 17, 2010" or "lightning storm Catskills"? The former, in convoluted and less than believable fashion leads to my blog; the latter not at all that I could figure (I tried). Note: Please consider this the postmodern portion of my blogcast day.

(3) I'm glad I had the car all day long because I bought a baker's dozen ears of corn at a farmstand along with other produce, and after spending a couple of hours in the kitchen this afternoon contributing to the household economy, I was like, where are the purple peppers? And the quart of tomatoes? I ended up having to go back - indeed I had left them there after paying. Glad it wasn't a wash.

Right now there's some really nice jazz piano on KZE, so conducive to chilling, mellowing out. Along with that, wafting up the stairs, is the aroma of blueberry cake.

I think I'll just let this post fly, as unpolished & all as it is. Hope all is well with you, my dear friend.