This week there were many queries from participants in my intensive juried poetry workshop that starts Monday. This group is quite talkative on line. Melenie and I have been making final preparations for class. I am always eager to meet the poets I selected and to put faces to names and voices to print. I think I’m done freezing spinach. Fourteen pounds in the freezer. It’s my least favorite freezing job as it is the most work and I get soaked to the skin –literally. Have even to change underwear afterward. Broccoli is so much more pleasant to freeze as are strawberries and rhubarb. I have a lot of that to get done this weekend before class takes up my days and a couple of evenings.I have close to enough strawberries – maybe 4 pints more to freeze, and then I should make freezer jam. I don’t know if I’ll have time to do that before the hospital, but I hope so. We got out of bed groggy and grumpy Thursday morning @ 4:45 to drive into Boston for my pre op. It was much more complicated than last year’s pre op. It felt as if the woman doing the tests was determined to find some reason I couldn’t have the operation. Then we went to Whole Foods for some shopping since I won’t be able to that for some time. Woody is out in the rain tying cherry tomatoes. He picked two baskets full of spinach that I just finished freezing. Everything in the garden is growing fiercely. It’s a mass of closely packed green except for maroon bulls blood beet greens, purple orach and orange tomato towers. When the rain stops, I have to start checking the garlic for garlic snakes to cut them off so the garlic will put its energy into making big cloves. Woody is going to start repairing the gazebo this afternoon as I hope to use it for conferences. It took a bad hit this winter. Winds blew holes in the roof and tore out one whole panel of screens. This is turning out to be a mosquito bonanza year, so we really need the screens up and holes blocked so the gazebo is usable. The downhill side was protected by Paul’s Himayalan musk, a wild rose that has grown all over that side of the gazebo, giving shade and when it blooms, a sweet musk rose scent. Many small white flowers in June. It’s a true rambler and will eventually grow over the roof and protect that too. I suspect the rain finished the red peonies that were so beautiful Wednesday. I was going to bring some in the house today. We finally got Sugar Ray to the vet successfully on Tuesday. He is healthy except for having to have a tooth pulled, which will have to wait till I am able to go back. I’m in the poetry workshop all day all week – classes in the morning and conferences in the afternoon and then off to the hospital early Monday morning. I was hoping to get to the dentist myself this week, but he’s off on vacation and not back till the day of my operation. Tonight is Captain Ramon’s 80^th surprise birthday party. We’ll bring gravlax we make. Last night we saw friends from Ithaca Katharyn Machen and her husband Eric. Katharyn has a new poetry book coming out from Finished Line that she gave me to read. I’ll probably take it to the hospital with me.