Thursday

Time. It's shocking how it can move quickly even as you're not doing anything that would warrant a significant usage of hours. It's like asking -- why did I need so much water, I wasn't that dirty? So, too, I'm genuinely puzzled -- why did I use so many hours, I have so little to show for it?

Typically, my semester Thursdays allow me to ease up a bit. But in that less taxing time frame, I stumble and in the end, I can only shake my head and wonder at how unfree that freer time feels.

So, following the delightfully late breakfast...






...and the those jobs I cannot now even remember doing, Ed and I go out to shovel out two truck loads of wood chips over the raspberry islands.






Yes, he's wearing shorts. Jubilant that the thermometer crawled upwards of forty, he decided it was warm enough for this.






In the evening, we eat dinner with the Fitchburg Fields people, giving our support to those incredibly hardworking types who are working to turn much of the land around us into small farming plots and community gardens.

This annual event is catered by Madison's best of the best -- the Underground Collective and so I am quite happy to shake off my beef abstenance and indulge. Give a non meat eater some meat and it's like tasting candy after not eating sugar for years.

I ate a lot of beef tonight. (On the plate, you can see the vegetables -- squash and kale; the beef is gone! Devoured!)





Yep, a lot of beef.

Late in the evening, Ed and I messed around with the details of our next (January) trip together. It has sticky points and it forces us to make peace with the other one's eccentricities.

We're getting there.

And I glance at the weather website and I see sunshine for tomorrow and I think -- oh, these days are so very very good!