Next Saturday is our annual garden party.  Thursday we took our friend Dale into Boston for chemo and while that was happening at Mass General, we did some shopping for it, including paper goods.  Then we picked him up on Charles Street. The traffic was unbelievable a bit after 4 pm.  It was a parking lot to the Expressway South.  Once we got past Weymouth, it was fairly fast, but we didn’t get home till 7:30.  We had bought take-out and ate it after I fed the starving cats. I am asking people as always to bring a dish or beverage, although I’ll do a lot of the cooking.  My friend Elise, who has pancreatic cancer and just finally got done with endless chemo, at least for a while, is coming Wednesday.  I am trying to get the ms. of my book of short stories THE COST OF LUNCH, ETC. cleaned up and to PM Press by Monday.  That’s important because of all the preparations for the party and because I want to spend as much time with Elise as I possibly can. I’m planning on shrimp, roast beef, gravlax [made this week], a rhubarb strawberry pie, chickpea feta salad, a Middle Eastern cuke mint salad – our garden is overflowing with cukes now and also zukes & pattypan & yellow squash and red cabbages.  Also makes a grilled zucchini salad, guacamole. I forget what else. We’ll have around 45. I used to cook for over 80 but two years ago, we cut the list sharply to only people we actually socialize with. The 2nd meeting of a local chapter of Cape Downwinders met Wednesday. We had  over 30 people but need many more.  There is no evacuation plan for Cape Cod – not us year round people or the many thousands of summer visitors and second homeowners.  The Pilgrim nuke power plant is a clone of Fukishima and like Fukishima is built on the water, on Massachusetts Bay. We’re directly in the path of the fallout zone. If something happens, the first thing that will happen is that they will close the bridges – which we couldn’t get across anyhow.  There is no escape for us and we are trying like hell to close the dirty polluting thing.  Our state senator is with us on this. So is our representative. We feel like we have something of a window of opportunity to get it closed. Every town meeting on the Cape voted for its decommission.  We know we’re doomed if we can’t shut it down.  Us and cats and dogs and piping plovers and bald eagles and great blue herons and foxes and coywolves and raccoons and rabbits and our air and our pristine water and our soil that grows all our vegetables. I intended to sleep in this morning as I was up late last night. I’m reading Bill Ayres new autobiography of the years since Bernadine and Bill came up from underground, PUBLIC ENEMY.  It’ll be out this fall, I think.  But my plans to sleep late were disrupted at 6:35 by very loud thunder and a very large cat landing on me crying pitifully. Xena is our youngest and biggest cat, a bulls eye tabby from the MSPCA.  She is not easily frightened or fazed.  Her attitude is, when I was a starving kitten in a filthy alley, I saw it all. But it turns out she is scared of thunderstorms.  I comforted her and then the other cats came to see what was wrong. Her little boyfriend Mingus [he is three years older and one/third her size, precisely] started washing her and she started washing him but when an enormous bolt of lightning struck nearby momentarily knocking out power and scaring me  too, she jumped right on me again and clung. No more sleep for me.