Woody had been trying to find someone to create raised beds for us in the two upper gardens. Nobody seemed terribly interested in the job and when they did give a quote, it was beyond our budget. Finally he found a way he could do some himself. The uppermost garden [the Rosa Luxembourg vegetable garden] he is going to turn into raised beds for me. The main garden will be all his to plant. We will both work on the lower garden, that already has 2 raised beds I planted last spring. They worked out very well and gave us excellent pumpkins and winter squash. I am eager to get back to gardening. I enjoy it, it makes me feel good and useful, I get into the sun and good air, we feast off the organic produce and it’s good exercise. I find most exercise boring except for walking and light hand held weights. But gardening except in the hottest weather is the kind of exercise that makes me feel good. I finally got back to the short story I began in November. Forward progress was stalled by reading mss for my juried intensive poetry workshop and being fiction editor of 5^th Wednesday for an issue, a job that included soliciting stories from authors whose work I know. Then I had the regional and national Jose Gouveia memorial contests sponsored by WOMR. Now I’m back to writing. Several new poems and the story finally polished. A trickle of mss is still arriving for the poetry workshop, but I’ve read 117 so far. The class is filled although I’m getting some excellent mss. I preaccept for next year. I’ve been working with the poets on lodging and transportation. We finished out work on the seed orders Sunday. Since then Melenie and I have been making the actual orders. Five have gone out so far. I find choosing seeds a pleasure. I feel the turning of the year. I switched to a MAC in 2010 after being on a PC sine ’82. But my Mac had developed a number of problems. Also I could not update things like Adobe because my operating system was too old. I could no longer see videos. It had weird bad habits of suddenly erasing blocks instead of single files. Etc. So I got a new iMac, turning in the old after having it wiped. Once I didn’t do that thoroughly and the person I gave it to was smirking about stuff she had managed to read in spite of my amateur wipe. It’s a bit skittish, the new computer, but much faster than my old and with less bad habits. Last Sunday I decided to do every exercise my previous PT had given me because my knees were behaving themselves. The result was that my left knee swelled up the size of a melon and I was in excruciating pain. I couldn’t walk. It was the worst pain I’d experienced since that first week out of hospital. I iced and iced and iced but finally halfway through the evening, around 9 pm, things started to improve and I could walk again, however awkwardly. By the next morning, almost all the swelling had gone. My knees remain a bit stiff but otherwise I’m mobile again. It was a serious scare. I had to take painkillers. I feared I’d totally screwed knee and possibly both. Today things are fine again. I’m not doing that again.We have a very light coating of snow over the gardens – not enough to do anything with. It looked for a while as if we would have a real storm but then it just stopped. We had tufted titmice at the feeder, a pair, for the first time this winter. I love their name. Say it three times tufted titmice   tufted titmice   tufted titmice.