It’s been a rainy week. I couldn’t get into the garden till yesterday when it cleared and then got very warm. Today I need to start the laundry as I can’t do it Monday – class and conferences all day. Also today I start freezing spinach.Spinach is a vegetable that freezes well, so we eat a lot of it during the winter. I’d like to freeze around 17 or 18 lbs if possible. Freezing spinach is not one of my favorite jobs as I get soaking wet. Freezing yellow or pattypan squash, beans, broccoli is much easier and more pleasant, but we need the spinach for winter meals. Beans and spinach are our winter staples. At the moment we’re eating some spinach, some bok choi and many many salads. I grow seven kinds of lettuce. We just ate the last of our spring radishes. The arugola is still good. The herbs are coming along well, but some varmint ate half the basil I started from seed. I’ll have to start more Genovese basil. We use a lot of basil, plus I make pesto and freeze it. As soon as the workshop is over, I want to start freezing and making preserves from local strawberries, preferably organic. We don’t grow them any longer as the birds always got to them first.I finished the last of the poetry mss. that I have been annotating for my workshop. Finally got to write a poem again myself on Thursday. I have been reading DORA BRUDER by French novelist Patrick Modiano. It’s a short novel more like a novella, but moving. I’ll read more by him if I can find it. I’ve also been reading Rachel Rose’s powerful new poetry book MARRY AND BURN. Rachel took my intensive poetry workshop a few years ago. Every so often, she sends me dried persimmons from Vancouver, where she lives. I enjoy them but never see them around here. She’s an accomplished award-winning poet.I was mesmerized by Comey’s testimony. However, the bad things are quietly ongoing that Congress and Trump appointees are doing internationally [preventing health care to women globally as much as they can as well as here at home] and to the environment and to the economy. Every day, some new disastrous choice. They are undoing the good works of 50 years.This has been an enormously difficult week. Larry, our plumber, warned us last winter that the floor in the downstairs bathroom was punk and we [and/or guests] might fall through. We have been trying to get someone to replace the floor and also replace the translucent roof on the sunporch as it’s leaking badly. The toilet had to be removed so the bathroom was unusable even had there been a floor in place after last Saturday. We found someone to do the work, but of course except for Thursday, when he wasn’t here, I’ve been unable to work. It’s too noisy. We had a scare with Willow when I did not hear him arrive. I lock up the cats as he leaves the door open to the outside and to the bathroom. I was afraid they would go outside, get eaten by coywolves as Max was, or go into the closed up crawl space under the house and we’d have to rip up more flooring to get to them.I’m a very private person who enjoys my solitude and quiet during much of the day, so having work ongoing in the house all week [except Thursday] including today is driving me a little crazy. The cats and I are discontent but the work has to be done. I have been leaning on Scott to get the toilet in the downstairs bathroom functional by Monday when I start having conferences here. I am hoping he gets the toilet in today. He’s working on it.