Nodding In: from birds to brief political notes, no organization

When I look out of the west-facing windows in my office, I see, through a frame of arbor vitae trees, a Norway maple, bits of sidewalk and street, bits of the lawns across the street. The leaves of the maple are now lying all over our lawn or blowing down the sidewalk and drifting up against people's front steps like snow. Across the street are a brown house and a white house with blue trim. Both of these are inhabited by fanatically neat people, who were out yesterday, just before the rain, raking and raking. Their green, green lawns have that impossibly tidy, just-combed, freshly-tucked-into-bed look provided by fanatical raking. As I was contemplating them, a huge cloud of dark leaves fell onto the entire expanse of sunlit lawn. A moment's examination proved them to be not leaves but rather a large flock of starlings. When something startled them they blew up into the trees again, momentarily releaving the bare branches, and then fell again to the earth.

I think it will be winter soon.

Descending to earth myself, I write journal entries in my head, but they never make it into typing. I am reading you all, truly, though my comments are sporadic. The book has quit cooperating, but I know how to get its goat: I'm typing in the handwritten stuff, of which there is quite a lot. So far I don't think it's garbage. Much more important, my shoulder does not object at all to the typing, and I am not getting that faintly scary pins-and-needles feeling that typing produced for the entire summer and much of the fall.

Last week got eaten by cat and refrigerator difficulties (not related). We hauled both Ari (limping badly on his left front paw) and Jordan (suffering minor symptoms that looked like the recurrence of her major scary ear infection of last month) into the vet's on Monday. Ari proved a mystery, but since he's improving, I am only a little worried. Jordan has to have another course of antibiotics, of which she does not approve. The refrigerator, a comparatively new one, turned out to have had its evaporator improperly installed, which led to everything's being filled up with ice, as if it were trying to make winter all on its own. It has now been reduced to a sense of its own importance.

David seems to like his new job. Eric is coming to visit Thanksgiving week. I've started reading new fiction again. Raphael and I watched Dogma last night, and it did make a most peculiar counterpoint to the Pullman's His Dark Materials.

Notes to self: Lindsay Graham is a big fat liar, and I hardly dare hope that the corrupt and evil Bush administration is actually going to implode, but it might.

P.