This week it was actually pleasant working in the garden. I planted parsnips, beets of 2 kinds and put in seedlings from the greenhouse of finochi, Italian [flat leaved] and curly parsley. Woody put in the remaining red cabbage and broccoli seedlings with my help. We have just about all of the hardy garden in. This week, we’ll start cautiously on the tender seedlings and seeds.Friday I finished the revisions on my new novel THE HOUSE AT HOPE’S END and sent if off yesterday to my agent. It’s a tremendous relief to be done with it. it has consmed an great amount of my time, energy and thought for months. I will feel free when it sinks in. it cut way done on my poetry. I’m eager to get to write more than a poem every two weeks. I have been pushing, pushing, pushing. I developed terrible eye strain from working at the computer ten hours a day for weeks. For one week, I could neither read nor write. when I was able to write again, I pushed just as hard to get the novel off. Next week Wednesday, I have to start reading and mss. from poets in my annua juried intensive poetry workshop. I generally can read, reread and annotate one ms a day, usually three a week. I’m looking forward to that.The warm weather came suddenly. I had not put away any woolens or taken from the storage closet any of my warm weather clothes. So I’ve been doing that whenever I get a half hour slot. It got so warm that we put up the screens and screen doors this week. they’d been storage in one of our sheds. I even had the fan on in the living room. When the glass windows are on the sunporch and there are no leaves on the trees overhead, it heats up to 110 degrees on a sunny day. So Woody put the screen door on the sunporch and two screens, to cool it down. Probably this coming week, we’ll exchange the remaining big glass windows or equally big screens. I’m trying to figure out which of the tender seeds and seedlings should go out safely.It's gorgeous outside. Hundreds of daffodils, the Cornelian chery still in bloom [actually a bushy yellow dogwood, no relation at all to cherry trees], the first red tulips, anemonies like pale blue stars on the ground and a lot of intense dark blue scilla siberica, mostly where it planted itself. Some varmint ate most of my tulips and dug a large hole under the house. I won’t use poison. I tried boiling water or just the hose. I don’t think it caused the creature any inconvenience. Probably the condo below ground has many exits.Town meeting took three nights this week. This coming Monday is town election. Woody and I have long discussions in the car about who and what we should vote for and against. We don’t always agree but usually. Something happened this week. He had set up a program to be transmitted live on Tuesday. He had confirmed it. He spent his usual two days preparing. Went to the studio. Waited. The doctor stood him up. So rude. No message, no apology, nothing. It’s the first time that happened in all his years of broadcasting.Unfortunately, Schwartzie who watched the girls Willow and Xena catch mice efficiently for a year and a half, has decided to catch his own mice. But unlike the girls – Willow learned proper mousing behavior from Xena – who dispatch the mice almost immediately, Schwartzie likes to play with them. I got up in the middle of the night and there was Schwartzie with a fat grey mouse in the bathtub. Encouraged by my presence, Xena jumped into the tub to kill the mouse. Schwartzie grabbed it carefully in his mouth, so as not to injure it, and took off pursued but likely without success by Xena. No dead mouse this morning. It got away from him. Or perhaps he let it go.Learning WORD 2016 is an great pain in the head. So many bells and whistles that the simplest acts necessary for writing become totally opaque. I have a book but reality doesn’t seem to correspond. Word is making a line THROUGH everything I type and following the instructions doesn’t do anything useful. Everything on computers gets more complicated and less efficient. I wonder if anybody ever uses all the ‘ribbons’ across the top of each page, each with about 175 options.Tonight, we go out to dinner with friends at an Italian restaurant people have recommended but we’ve never been to. Every so often we get pizza or gyros as take out or Chinese food in one of two places we like in midCape but we seldom eat in a restaurant unless we’re traveling. It’s a treat but costly if you do it often. Besides, I like my own cooking better than anyone else’s.