Apparently there is a strategy to blogging effectively, and I probably should do some research to inform myself.  But here it is a rainy, gray, somewhat sleep inducing January day when I would have preferred to be out walking at the Knightville Dam or the Northampton Reservoir, but was delayed by a series of unfortunate small, mundane life events.  So this blog will be my journey outward for this Saturday.  Untutored but hopefully satisfying.

The day began with a somewhat disconcerting chirping bleep at regular intervals from 3AM on.  Of course, it was the new hardwired smoke detector outside my bedroom door.  In my sleep sodden state I first dismantled the free standing carbon monoxide detector, hoping to solve the problem quickly and return to bed.  It was not in fact that simple, and the beeping continued until the time I emerged from a far away bedroom, figured out online how to turn off the correct circuit breaker, take a hardwired thingie apart, find what kind of batteries it needed and replace them.  Before going to the hardware store, however, to buy new perfect batteries to avoid a replay of the middle of the night issue, I decided to also remove the sump pump which had broken recently and bring it to the hardware store for a replacement model.  My friend Dan sweetly and generously dismantled the sump pump, and we brought the wet rusted thing to the bathroom to make sure it was broken.  In that process a plant managed to fall over on the floor, and the bathmat in the bath was soiled with sump pump juice and oil, now needing to be replaced.  I cleaned up the mess.

We went to the hardware store, found the correct sump pump, bought batteries, returned home to find that we needed a large wrench to take apart the old sump pump before attaching the new one.  Dan was about to go to find a larger wrench but came out to the driveway where his car had a flat tire.  He replaced the tire in the snow, I put the new batteries in the smoke detectors, turned on the electricity, went to open my window shade which seemed stuck in the down position, it unwound in my hands, cutting a finger and blood managed to leak over the whiteness of the shade.  Red blood on white snow.

Okay, I say.  There is a lesson here.  It is definitely not a good day to take any risks, for one.  A drive anywhere would be tempting fate.  I will not leave the house, at least until a reading of Linda McCullough Moore’s short story pulls me to a local venue.  But, I ask, is there some message when days like this occur?  Should we take heed?

In the meantime… I have a huge 22 foot drawing going up at the Mass Mutual Convention Center in Springfield Ma in a couple weeks and dropped it off yesterday.  My studio in an old mill in Holyoke was closed down in December after my being there for 25 years, so I will be looking for new space in the Northampton area this spring.  And, most exciting,  I am off to a writing residency at La Napoule on the Mediterranean near Cannes in France for the month of March.  It’s at a castle right on the water.  I am thrilled.  I guess there have to be rainy days like this to let the other days feel like magic.  Uh oh… is that a chirping sound I hear coming out of ….