May 2, 2025
Happy Birthday, Patrick!   Love you.

Went out to chase clouds tonight with the intention of finding a rainbow.  Emily had just texted me one taken from her kitchen window.  I had to go look.  Didn't find one, but I did find these huge mountain clouds.



Started the day off fighting myself to get up and out to the pool.  This routine is the stupidest thing I do all week, because I know how wonderful I feel once I'm in the water.  Getting out of the water is even harder.  I am a fish.  I knew that at 3 when I was thrown in the pond by my father.  And at 5, when we spent the summer in Welfleet and we lived at Duck Pond, I thought I should always be on the water.  I still think that.  But I have to fight with myself, anyway.



I wanted to be anti-social all day, but that didn't work out.  It was lucky that the people I saw at the end of the afternoon were some of my favorite people.  That was much nicer than being in public.  I was in public a lot this week.  It's not as easy for me as it use to be.  I'm going to be a loner most of the weekend.  I say that knowing I'm going to the theater tomorrow night and I am working Sunday.   Most of the weekend I will be a loner.

I'm glad I got up to the rookery tonight.  It was 69 at 6:40 this evening.  There were giant clouds all over the valley, and I really was looking for a rainbow.  But the rookery was absolutely still and clear and the songbirds were loud.  A tufted titmouse was proclaiming his existence as loud as could be.  Merlin told me everyone who was there.  I saw a small muskrat again and several ducks were around.



The storm is moving in, the clouds above, at this point, are dark and heavy.  I think we'll get thunder tonight.  But I'm not complaining about the weather.  This week has been pretty damned perfect.  It was one of the 4 weeks a year for which one lives in New England.  Really beautiful! 

I stopped smoking on May 2, 1988.  I was a heavy smoker, but I was taken to the hospital very ill and no one was about to wheel me down to a solarium for a smoke in the hospital, so for 9 days of hospitalization including surgery and recovery I did not have a smoke.  When I got home I thought, if you do something knowingly that might make you that sick again, you are crazy.  So since then, I have smoked one cigarette in 2001.  I smoke in my dreams sometimes.  
 

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