The week began on Monday with reading my Kaddish at a memorial for a friend who died after a botched heart operation.  Sunday had been raw so we worked inside for a change. Tuesday my publisher Ramsey at PM Press wanted me to write two descriptions of THE COST OF LUNCH, ETC. my book collecting a number of my short stories. One description had to be about 150 words and the other 300.  It was hard to do the second but I finally got them both done.  There are some earlier short stories in the collection, some revised, some as they were first published.  But the bulk of the book is comprised of new stories I wrote over the last year and a few months. It took me so long to accomplish the descriptions that I only had time to plant some sunflowers I had started in early April.  I love sunflowers.  I always plant the tall ones that also make seeds – the birds love them. The house is surrounded by a flutter of birds and the staccato drilling of three different kinds of woodpeckers, downy, hairy and red bellied in their pairs.  We’ve never had so many woodpeckers at once. This week I began reading the portfolios – 15 poems apiece and their personal statements – of the participants who will be in my juried intensive poetry workshop in June.  I can only annotate and critique  one a day when I have enough time, so I try to do four a week.  I have also begun to go over my lectures and examples and assignments.  Did the first day. Wednesday I worked with my assistant and then had an appointment with my knee doctor in Ptown.  Stuffed peppers for supper with kasher --- nice big peppers I froze last summer.  Critiqued another poet’s portfolio. Thursday we went to Boston – that is, to Cambridge first and then to Brookline.  Cambridge: catfood at Petsmart; organic meat and  fruit @ Whole Foods.  Brookline: my eye doctor to check on my glaucoma. Friday: did another portfolio, had my hair cut in Orleans, planted winter squash and seven teepees of pole beans, yellow, purple and green.  I put in all butternut. The other varieties will have to wait till tomorrow.Company: Lois & Ramon.  Simple dinner  -- some hors d’oeuvres including guacamole I make and pot stickers I buy.  Then slow roasted bottom round with a spicy rub; little potatoes; salad from the garden.  Little fruit tarts for dessert. Some male cat has been peeing in the diningroom.  I have to figure out how to stop that.  I think it’s because  Mr. Black & White is leaving little gifts on the doorstep.  He is unaltered,  wants to be our cat although to judge from his glossy coat and girth, he is hardly homeless.  I think all cats want to live here. I am working over the poem about Pilgrim Nuclear Leaky Fukishima Clone  reactor.  Trying to make it stronger.  One of the expendables, it’s called.  Sunday I have been asked to read it at the rally to protest the relicensing of the doom machine on the bay.  There is no way for us to be evacuated when it melts down or is destroyed by a hurricane or the 3000 spent rods festering on the roof cause a nasty reaction.  “Shelter in place” they say which means, eat radiation, drink it, take it in , shut up and accept your cancerous fate. Saturday I overdid it in the heat in the garden planting winter squash and sunflowers. Sunday I read my “one of the expendables” poem at the rally by Pilgrim.  Very few young people.  Do younger people think that radiation and a meltdown won’t kill them? Destroy their livelihood?  Render their land uninhabitable?  Taint their wells and soil? Kill their pets and whatever wildlife they may care about?   The rally was good, but it was those of us mostly who have been demonstrating for decades.  Dan Wolf our state senator spoke well and there was a Japanese women from a village near Fukishima with her translator who spoke about what happened to her hometown and fellow villagers.  And how their government lied to them and withheld information that couldl have prevented them from absorbing so much radiation.   Think it can’t happen here?  Remember Three Mile Island and the huge coverup that denied what happened to local people.