The Pleasures of MS-WORD

We’re going over to Karen Pasquale’s tonight for an Italian meal. She’s an excellent cook! Nobody is coming over for meals this week. My friend Gigi visited Thursday afternoon, which I enjoyed a great deal. And today, a previous poet from one of my June workshops is coming by to visit. I have been under the weather the latter part of this week, but am fine now.

I did a good deal of potting herbs and some ornamentals I try to preserve through through the winter if I can: so far, 4 rosemaries, a tarragon, and various succulents. Today,  I get the time, I’ll pot an oregano, re-pot chives and cut back lemon verbena and dehydrate it. Maybe I’ll see something else.

Friday night, we had a meal of leftovers – gyros, Cornish game, and who knows what else – after a busy day doing al laundry and working on a poem. Too tired even to try a new recipe for Napa cabbage I’m trying out – appropriately, an orienal recipe, Chinese I suspect, although the source wasn’t given where I found it on line.

I am reading a manuscript by an editor I’m familiar with, to see if I can blurb it. I finished Pat Barker’s THE VOYAGE HOME, the third in her women of Troy series. Excellent and addictive. I am wondering what to read next. Haven’t heard anything form Knopf, although my agent queried twice. I have a new editor, if she actually wants to be my editor. My long time editor retired in December. It’s been a month and no word. Obviously, I’m low on the list.

At the end  of October, we still have gorgeous flowers, especially dinner plate dahlias and daisy-like Japanese anemones, white with gold centers almost weighing down the branches of the perennials, there are so many blooms.  Various flowers in the pollinator beds, too – asters, for instance, that bees love.

My new computer just arrived, but we haven’t yet unpacked it. We will get to it today or tomorrow. Then I’ll call My Computer Help to transfer data from the old cranky Dell to what I hope will be a better one.

I hate MS-WORD but I have to use it. It actually slows me down now when I’m trying to write. Random messages interrupt. When I want to fix a simple typo, it can take minutes. Everything about the program has gotten so cumbersome. If every place I submit to didn’t demand manuscripts and poems in MS-WORD, I’d switch to a more writer-friendly program immediately. They have loaded it with features that are useless to me and for some unknown reason always changing (what happened to INSERT?). And each newer version they foist on us is worse and worse. I know several writers who use a different program to write in, and then transfer each work to WORD to send it out. Maybe that’s next.

Of course, under everything is a percolating anxiety about the election. I’m certainly way too old to move to Canada. I don’t want to try to live through four more years of a fascist president and I am not yet ready to die – although under Trump, I might be.