Our skylights have leaked during heavy rains ever since the dining room was built onto the house, but with all the wet weather this spring, it became impossible for it to go on flooding the dining room.  We hired a home improvement crew to fix the skylights and keep the roof from leaking. They came, they worked several days, they left and the next rain more water poured in.  They came back, worked on it. The next rain, more water inside. They came back this week to rip out the old skylights and put new ones in.  Two days, they said. On Friday they were still here.  It hasn’t rained yet since they left.  I have sworn to Woody that if it still leaks, they are not coming back.  They roof of the dinign room is right outside my office, right by my computer, so it made it harder to work this week.

Since I can’t walk well, it’s a nuisance when we have to go out as their truck is blocking the way out. Plus the poor cats were locked up in the back of the house all week.  Schwartzie was particularly freaked by the banging and the power saw. I work as best I can but they were on the roof right outside my office.  It has been hell.  I go to physical therapy in Ptown twice a week and it was difficult to get in and out.

I haven’t gotten as much done on my next poetry book this week, but I am plodding on.  I’ve gone through all the sections three times but I know they’re still too long.  I want to get the manuscript together and then go through it.  Dale and I can start on that Monday.  We are still fighting a losing war with the rabbits.  We’ve never had as much trouble with our gardens as we’re having this summer.  The tomatoes have blossom end rot from the extremely wet spring all through June and a bit into July, followed by very hot humid weather.  We’re trying to combat that, or we won’t even get any tomatoes this year.  We’re fucked.

We watched the Patriots second and third stringers beat theLions second and third stringers last night in an impressive showing.  I was excited by the rookie quarterback Stidhamor something like that. Haven’t mastered his name yet.  No matter how I parse his name it looks likea misspelling. He has a good arm, is mobile and seems poised under pressure.Three of the new receivers look good. The best was undrafted. 

I have eight sections at present.  I keep wondering if that’s too many.  Language shapes my life, into the twilight zone, U.S., A Jew in American Now, Love is not an Accident, Mishpocheh = Family, The shades of Friendship and There is aSeason.  I keep taking out poems, but it’s getting harder and harder. I’ve played with coalescing two of them, but so far that hasn’t worked. I keep tweaking the order too.  But it’s time to start putting it all together, a job that Windows makes much harder and more complicated than it ever was before.

The shootings are terrifying and even more upsetting is the inability of the Republican controlled senate and the orange one to do anything at all that could slow this rampage down. And then ripping parents from their children in raids or at the border goes on and on and on.  They simply have no compassion except foreach other and the wealthy whom they respect and nobody else.  Trump can’t even empathize enough to show real feeling for the dead and wounded.

This summer is very disappointing in the garden. The spring was terrific, with lots of spinach, broccoli, red cabbage that    we’re still eating and will be for a while, lettuce that lasted through June.  But the rabbits have eaten our butternut squash and all the smaller pumpkins that looked so great in early July as well as just about everything else except the good garlic crop and the leeks that are doing very well now.  They haven’t yet touched the Swiss chard or the pattypans, but everything else is breakfast, lunch and supper for them.