After the company, the party, the 4^th, this week was uneventful and wonderfully so.I had a Friends of the Council on Aging meeting, some work to do for that, a dental appointment and a lot of catching up on correspondence, bills, email.  I also got back to writing poetry and wrote four poems and revised a few.  Time to send out again.  I do that every few weeks in batches. It cooled down enough for me to get into the garden, pick a basket full of black currants.  I made a bunch of black currant freezer jam and some black currant vinegar.  I also started cilantro-ginger-garlic vinegar.  And started seedlings offall brocolli, cabbages, bok choi, and two kinds of radicchio – the round ones and the tall loaflike ones, and two kinds of Chinese cabbage.  Then yesterday I started fall cilantro, more basil and succession cucumbers. We are getting red cabbages, which I’ll cook tonight with sour apples & lamb sausages, lots of pattypans. The yellow squash & zucchini have slowed down momentarily.  The cucumbers are at full throttle.  We have begun getting both frying & regular peppers.  Today it’s hot again but we have to harvest the garlic and set it to cure in the gazebo and also weed the herb garden. This year has been a splendid opportunity for weeds to take over the world.  Global warming means more and even some different weeds.  This week it’s time to make strawberry jam and also to start making and freezing basil and also some lemon basil. Woody is preparing for the humor workshop he is giving at Omega in Rhinebeck NY next weekend.  Monday I start preparations for the big memoir & autobiographical fiction workshop we teach together the first week of August. I have been making up with the cats for their neglect during my juried intensive poetry workshop and prep for the party.  During the party itself, they were locked up in the back of the house lest any guest using the bathroom let one of them out.  They hate that.  It’s like the 60’s song by one of the girl groups, “I see the party lights.”  Puck was particularly incensed as he saw all that good food going outside.  I have been giving them the attention they crave and need, especially as indoor cats.  Sugar Ray went to the vet for his annual checkup.  Last October he went to radiocat in Winchester and had to spend four days there after being given a needle of radioactive iodine to get rid of his hyperthyroidism.  It was a complete success, although it took him three weeks to forgive me.  He’s now in perfect health, has put on the weight he lost and is very lively, playing and socializing. I am a great fan of the Fire and Ice books by George R. R. Martin, so Woody got me some of his earlier works.  I’m also reading Charles Simic’s New and Selected Poems.  And Cooks magazine that I just discovered earlier this year, and now subscribe to.  It’s the only really useful zine about cooking I’ve ever discovered, not fancy dishes with 75 ingredients, but actual useful information and recipes I can cook. I don’t look forward to Woody going off to Omega by himself.  During daytime, I frankly do not miss him much as I am usually at home by myself or with my assistant anyway. But supper is dismal without him and the evenings are long and lonely and the nights even more so.  It takes me forever to get up in the mornings. The cats are good company but they can’t fill his place.  Also they don’t make coffee.  It’s rather sad.  When I was younger, I flew off on gigs every two or three weeks, but now we tend  to do them together more than alone. Besides, it’s always cheerier to be the one traveling than the one waiting at home.