2008-07-04

Happy Independence Day! As promised, it rained, off and on, all day, making it doubly sweet for Mick to have gotten all his weekly mowing done yesterday! I spent the morning in the kitchen – a rare thing for me – cooking up some picnic food. I made baked beans with sausage and tried to make stuffed eggs. We only had three eggs left from Avalon, and I boiled and peeled them, cutting them open to discover that only one of the three eggs had a yolk. This made the job harder! But I managed to eke out two small stuffed eggs apiece for us, using the slabs of white from the barren eggs and thanking the Lord that the one yolk was a great big one.

I had ambitious plans for tearing into my ginormous backlog of e-mail in the afternoon, but a series of small naps and a general feeling of laziness overcame those plans and I only pecked away at the Inbox. I wrote my roommate at MacDuffie, telling her what a great time I had with her at Patty’s wedding. I let the folks at FATE Magazine know that I’d asked Gary to send them an image of our logo – they are giving us a free ad! I wrote Ian B to thank him for updating me on his e-address.

And I wrote Barbara B, the agent with whom I had such a good telephone discussion recently about the possibility of her representing me, asking her what the etiquette was on how long a manuscript should be given to a publisher to consider. Hampton Roads has had The Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues for a solid month now, and no word. I am ready to take it somewhere else. I’ll be interested in what she has to say.

Other than reworking some recipes, that was the sum total of my work today. Mick and I had a whirlpool before Mick took the tarpaulin off the big stack of wood in our fire pit and lit it up for our celebratory dinner – hot dogs roasted over the flames. They were wonderful! The slaw, beans, stuffed eggs and potato chips made a great, nostalgic accompaniment to the wieners. It rained on us, gently, for a while but we outlasted the shower and enjoyed watching the afternoon turn to sunset and then to dusk. When the gloaming yielded to night, we offered the Gaia Meditation, with Mick praying at the end, and happily called it a holiday.