An early workout at the Y today, and then --horrors! -- it was time to mow our too-large lawn once again. However, it turned out to be a rather enjoyable experience, what with the cool, fall-ish weather and a good book to listen to on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Amazingly, I zipped through the job with enthusiasm and ease.

Cia and I are continuing our reading of The Brothers Karamazov, and I'm already finding that I have to go back and re-read, slowly, whole chapters.  I miss so much on the first reading, perhaps because we're listening to a recording and following in the book. Perhaps the recording makes me a little lazy about focusing carefully on exactly what's happening. I'm going to work on zeroing in on the words and zooming in on the sentence-by-sentence meaning. 

Lately, I've been having fun "finding" poems in newspaper articles. I randomly pick an article, then randomly select some words and phrases from the article, and then freely and unsystematically write a poem using those words in that order. It's great fun, which is exactly what writing poems should be. 

Two magnetic poems for today . . . 

A preying mantis on Cia's hand

Jane Austen, Will Shakespeare, and Charles DIckens enjoying life on my desk
with some of their four-legged friends