Uh-oh. It's getting all fall-y.

I spent the majority of this past weekend on the couch, with the windows open, downloading classical music, and reading short stories.

Well, I mostly slept on the couch. And I made some banana bread and it made the house warm. This rainy, chilly, but-not-too-cold weather is the best. I went for walks in the mist. I wore sweatshirts and put hoods over my head. I wore socks. I love wearing socks. It's like sweatshirts for your feet! (When I told the Good Doctor how much I loved wearing socks, he told me that it was gay.)

I snuggled with Ryan, Lance, and Shannon in the rain, while we stood in a long line for ice cream. Just like old times.

I know it's going to get hot again, summer isn't over. Nor should it be. But don't you want to watch football and sniff your school supplies before you organize them very neatly, and perhaps alphabetically in your backpack? I do.

Soon, I will prepare for my move to South Minneapolis. I've been avoiding it up until now, leaving the boxes in the garage. But by the end of this week I'll have to start driving over-stuff boxes down 35W. I may go to Home Depot to buy brown paint for my bedroom. I have even been looking at couches online, and deciding which one might be the best for me to purchase. And by "purchase," I mean "charge to my credit card."

So far, I think I've been successful at managing this convulted schedule of literature and market copy. I spend two days a week sipping mint tea at my desk at Graywolf, reading literary magazines, and the slushpile, and sending desk copies of books around the country. It's wonderful. I spend the rest of the week in another office, sipping coffee with too-much-sweetner to make it drinkable, whipping through pages and pages of market copy in order to minimize my workload for the weekend. Weeks go by slow, but they're tolerable. It's just the big shift in the middle. I thought, originally, it'd be like: I only have a 3 day week! But, um. No. It's not like that at all. Tuesday feels like Friday, and Wednesday feels like Monday, and I sort of feel like I am two people. It's impossible to think of one job while doing the other.

Tonight I taught Kristin's class. Good kids. Funny fucking kids. They read Tony Hoagland and wrote about gas station bathrooms.

I went to go look at a house with the Good Doctor yesterday, a lakeshore property in Maple Grove. Can you imagine, waking up to a lake in your backyard everyday? Sipping hot drinks at the edge of your dock? Swimming and boating and a fire pit? Having a good place to weigh down and store all of those dead bodies that are stinking up your basement?

It's been a long day.