What a sweet Sunday morning. Outdoors the air is bright and still, with some frost at the edges. I'm back in bed nursing my carrot-orange juice and tepid cafe-au-lait (ole!) and cold gruel-with-blueberries-and-goat-milk.

This is the last week goat milk will be available here at the supermarket. Stocking it was a bold experiment that didn't take. It was in my own budget too rarely to convince their accountants it was worth keeping, I guess, so it's been discontinued, and I bought up what I could of the shelf stock and froze it.


Yesterday I put together the heavy white corner desk and chair that came in a kit from some online close-out sale, the perfect birthday present for brotherB. I've never seen him as happy as he is this morning, hard at work there with his stencils and pens. Meanwhile in the livingroom a mountain of coats and sweaters, the storage for which had to be eliminated to make room for B's new desk, looms dark and enormous. I will scale it anon.

From my spot on the bed I can see through the door and out the livingroom window our little herd of deer in the vacant lot hungrily cropping the green furze. Winter's far from over here, but this past warm week or two brought some tender tips of grass out.

It's been a week of frustration and annoyance at the Bookworm shop. I was out ill until Thursday and then hit it on all cylinders Friday. But the shop will falter and fail: The steady stream of donations that keeps the shelves filled must first get past the head librarian, who steadfastly refuses to release them. All she'll let us have are the boxes and bags of tatty romances that go straight to the landfill or storage shed. For a month her sorting table has been heaped with gorgeous like-new biographies and histories and travel books, cook books, CDs and videos, and the shop is starved as all the good stuff has been bought and fewer and fewer customers return for the fresh stock that consistently is not there. It's as though she wants to starve us. But really, she doesn't understand the marketplace, and how deadly such games can be.

I'll draft an email, yet another plea, explaining how the flow of volumes must be constant to keep the shop alive, and this time I'll cc some Friends-of-the-Library brass.

So much to do today. I can hardly keep myself from getting out of bed. I'll make a list of everything I must address - outline my PSA presentation for the FOL meeting in 9 days, send out the announcement for the first monthly brown-bag workshop in the library conference room (where I'll orient volunteers and teach them how to examine and describe books to post for sale online, and how to clean and repair them, and how to pack and ship them, and so on), keyboard and print labels for the shelves and new pricing signs, and then finally my personal goals for the week month and year (and even lifetime) - and then I'll lay out the tarot as I used to those years of Sunday mornings when all I could do was lie here and convalesce.

Then I'll get up and tackle that mountain.