Flooded Lowlands

I haven't been out since the last rains. We didn't get hit as hard as West Virginia (just a few miles away) but it was serious weather. The power was out a few times, so I ate cold beans. I do have to get some things, eggs, bread and butter, and I have a couple of boxes of paper to recycle which I've put right in the middle of traffic zones so that I'd damned sure get rid of them. 95 degrees today, cooling off to 75 tonight. Too hot to do anything but sit with a fan and read. I did think about a couple of building projects, but they can wait for cooler weather. B had saved several hundred pages of my writing from a few years ago, maybe ten years ago, and I read through some of that, then I went back even further, to the writing about building this house, most of which is gone forever, and I had a couple of thoughts. One is, that as a record, it doesn't need much work, a few tense corrections, a few comma/conjunction interactions; but if I wanted to lift out a section, turn it into a separate thing, I'd need to edit in a different way. Text. Not a day goes by that I'm not engaged by text. Beowulf got me today, I had Volume 3 of the 11th out, AUS to BIS, reading about Bessemer's way of making steel, and I was just skip-reading through encyclopedia entries, and stumbled on this long piece (pages, and I have to use reading glasses, so I get a head-ache) about possible sources for Beowulf. An interesting subject, because it falls right at that transition from spoken to written. A lot of the 'problems' with Beowulf, are that the later sections become extraneous, but it's just the bard earning his keep, you can't fault him that. What strikes me, after a day of pursuing this, is that Beowulf is most like the Scandinavian stuff, "The Kavala" Mom figures prominently in that. I can't find my copy, I hope to god that I didn't loan it to someone. The bottoms will all be flooded again, and the fact that the Boone Coleman family, having planted the bottoms in soy beans, will be subsidized, to the tune of the average of their last three year's production, so they make a million dollars and don't even have to harvest a crop, bothers me. I've never been paid for not growing a crop. My sleep schedule has become completely arbitrary. I knew I needed to get to town today, pay a couple of bills, so I slept for a few hours early this morning and got up ready to go. Cleaned up, drove the long way around, and I had thought out the run of errands I needed to run and arranged them. Stopped at the bank, mailed a bill at the PO just across the road, then out to the vehicle insurance place, a couple of miles in the wrong direction. In the future I'll just mail this, ditto with the license tags, which I also took care of, then a pleasant stop at the library, with both AC and the smell of books. Anne Proulx's new book, Barkskins, was there, and I was looking forward to it, I'd read some reviews, and I love her writing, so I picked up some grazing food, gherkins, olives, some thin roll-ups of roast beef with horseradish sauce, some saltines, and read a couple of hundred pages. Rolling thunder, I'd better go.