Something

Not like nothing. A scream in the night that's definitely cat-like. The adjacent rustle of leaves. Accompaniment. You get used to it. What goes on, beyond the mouth of my cave, is what goes on. At 2:46 in the morning, it doesn't affect my well-being, but it wakes me. The merry dance between inside and outside. I make a cup of tea, I have some great black tea, that I take with cream and sugar, I don't remember where it came from, people send me things. Comforting to hold a substantial wood-fired mug of hot sweet tea on a cold night. I need to talk with TR about how a dash is different from a hyphen. Comes down to notation, no way to program the nuance. Best you can do is leave a mark, in the margin, that means the performer extends whatever it is for a few bars. Lingering sound. Throwing lentils at a cymbal. How cool is that? Zach is the best musician I've ever worked with, the tension between him and Emily is palpable. Was. That's done, now, and we're on to another project, the janitor, in space and time. One thing that bothers me about the janitor stuff is that it floats in tense; you don't have to get very deep into this before you realize the past is the present, and the notation is critical. B thinks it's clear and that I shouldn't worry about it. Sara loves the idea of the book, insightfully said today that she likes the way the tone of my writing, which is more likely to be about food or nature, doesn't change at all when I shift to the janitorial material. I usually don't know when the shift is coming, although occasionally, something in my actual janitorial duties strikes me, and I make a note. It's way too much fun going back through. 278 entrees mention Janitor College, most of them average half a page, but they're all single-spaced. The one about the dude killed by a sugar-beet while driving his convertible during harvest season in Michigan is hysterical. The new heater is great, and has a built in timer, so I can set it to come on before I get up in the morning and before I get home in the afternoon, which will eliminate building fires in the morning, and ease the pain of coming home to a very cold house. The phone company, Frontier, has finally addressed the issue of outages on Mackletree, and there are three crews from Nelson Tree Removal working toward my place. They're two-thirds done, but the last third is through the forest, and will take them two weeks. They use a boom truck with a giant circular saw blade on the end of the boom. Two trucks to grind and haul, but they don't have to haul it far, as everyone wants a load of chipped wood; another utility truck to keep everything running, seven guys, four weeks. Probably between $25,000 and $40,000, I can't imagine it being any less. An expensive piece of work to provide service for three homes stretched over several square miles. I have several acorn squashes that I rescued from the outdoor display at Tim Horton's before the first frost, but I'm looking forward to the ham and bean soup next weekend, the squash will keep and the cream soups they offer, what I want is bean soup with ham and corn sticks.