Trying to calm down

I finally got a full night’s sleep Thursday. Not much of that since the election. It was a week of trying to catch up on so many things. The poets pre-accepted for next year’s June intensive poetry workshop have all paid their deposits. Next week I’ll open the workshop to others who might be interested. Normally I read 100 plus mss. and fill out the workshop until I reach 12 and 2 alternates, since often somebody drops out when it’s time to send in their ms. and pay the remainder of the fee. It gets real then. If very good mss. come in after I’ve filled it, I give them an option to be pre-accepted for the next year should theiy choose to do so. We’re seriously behind in garden work, in prepping for the cold weather. It’s supposed to get colder next week, 40’s in the daytime and 30’s at night. We’re still eating form the garden, of course. We went to the city Thursday to meet with one of my poets who was also a returning poet last month, Anastasia. She’s a very fine poet and just retired from her corporate job. We had lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, ChangSho in Cambridge. it was good tro see her and hear how her poetry is progressing and how she feels about retiring on the young side. We also bought cat food. Since we got Schwartzie, we are going through catfood at a much greater pace. Not only is Schwartzie growing visibly almost by the day, but his appetite and the increased exercise he gets them into has given even the other three cats a bigger appetite. Breakfast and supper are hectic, with the cats rushing from plate to plate and shoving and sharing. Xena doesn't like the ruckus and insists on eating separately, on a nearby cabinet. Then we shopped for Thanksgiving. It has crept up on us. We’ll get a fresh organic turkey locally but I was hoping to get a good pumpkin to make rum pumpkin pie. We did badly with pumpkins this year. We had borers in August when it was too hot to notice. I rather abandoned the lower garden the latter part of the summer. We still got more beans than we needed or wanted but the borers had their way with the pumpkins and winter squash. Their way was lethal. Surprisingly, Whole Foods had no pumpkins at all the week before Thanksgiving. A clerk told me they cleared them out to make room for Christmas trees. I was annoyed. I’ll have to get one locally. I actually have a good one for stuffing, but I need another to make rum pumpkin pie. Have to bake the pumpkin in advance and puree it. I don’t like the taste of canned pumpkin as It doesn’t taste rich enough. We’re used to the flavor of the pumpkins we grow, chosen for their flavor. I got a few, but only a few this year, including one I’ll use for Thanksgiving. I make a modified version of Julia Child’s potiron tout rond. I wrote 2 poems this week and read another 100 pp of Adrienne Rich’s collected poems. It happened that while we were in Cambridge, we passed the house where she lived for a time when I used to see her and have lunch with her on a regular basis. I remember that during that time I tried to make peace between Adrienne and Denise Levertov as they had previously been close. Denise would have no part of my efforts to mediate. I liked Denise but I was closer to Adrienne. I annoyed Denise to no end. Couldn’t bring them together. We have a smallish diningroom [a pleasant room with windows on three sides but hardly spacious] and this year, I replaced our decrepit diningroom table with a smaller one that gives us more space to move around. But eight is about all it will comfortably serve, so I plan on making a meal on Thanksgiving for eight. We could crowd ten in if we had to, but with eight, it should be comfortable.