Woody was gone yesterday from 10:45 a.m. till 10:40 p.m.  He went off with our friends Paul and Dan and also Ramon to Fenway Park in Boston to see the first of the Red Sex playoff games against Tampa Bay.  I have little interest in baseball and did not go with the guys.  I stayed home to catch up on reading, give the cats attention before we go off this week and deal with household stuff here.For the first time in close to three weeks, it began to rain in late morning and rained for a bit over three hours.  I was delighted.  It gave everybody a drink and the plants visibly grew by this noon.  It also cleared the air a bit of pollen that had been making just about everybody sneeze.I have been very active in Downcape Downwinders, the group we started in early June to close Pilgrim nuclear plant.  We are in the direct cone of radioactivity of this Fukushima clone, a very old and poorly run nuclear plant. There is no way to evacuate the Cape across two bridges, so they say “shelter in place,” which is this case means absorb all the radiation coming at your and die quickly of radiation poisoning or slowly from any one of the number of cancers.  It will also destroy The National Seashore, all the tourists and summer people besides us, the precious ecology of this fragile place, the shellfishing in industry.  Every town meeting on the Cape has voted to close Pilgrim, but Entergy, headquartered in Orleans, LA, doesn't give a damn. We are the expendables.On a lighter note, last night I was reading on the couch when I heard a ruckus downstairs, some chase.  Then Puck, my gourmet Abby, began to call loudly and strangely, over and over.  Xena, the rescue from the MSPCA, the youngest of our cats and the biggest, had been sleeping just beside me.  She woke, listening, and ran downstairs.  I followed.Puck was coming toward us with a live mouse in his mouth.  Xena met him halfway up the stairs. He carefully put the mouse down and she took it and carried it to the bathtub.  She got in, put the mouse down, he got in too.  I left them to their gladiatorial games.  By this morning, only a tail was left.  I find it astonishing how they cooperate on mouse hunts.  Puck always locates the mice initially. Sometimes he catches one, as he did last night, but often he calls her to come and hunt with him.  Sometimes, having engaged her, he leaves her to watch when a mouse goes under the long low radiators along the wall. She will wait for hours.We live in the woods. When my cats years ago were too elderly to hunt, we were overrun by mice, turds in the breakfast cereal, no grains in the cupboards safe, packaged chewed open.  So I let them do their thing because otherwise the mice make life disgusting.I have been working on my novel this week.  We planted garlic.  I grow the hard necked kind.  It does much better here.  I grow three varieties every year.  Woody plowed and I planted.  I potted the herbs I want to bring into the house, mostly rosemary and tarragon.  They’re all on the porch now.  They got rained on yesterday.  They’ll stay there till we get back from Ithaca.Tonight friends for potroast and I hope beans, corn and peppers – my version of succotash.