not feeling so well tonight; a huge cold/stuffy nose thing came down upon me. my daughter has covid and, since i gave her a ride or two, i'm hanging around wondering if it will turn into full-blown covid. hers has. she claims to have no sense of taste. i still feel like i have mostly a very bad cold. no fever, but it takes me a half hour to get up the stairs.

meanwhile the dogs are going at full blast. there are four of them and two don't get along with each other. well, one doesn't get along with that other one. the other one, the larger one, takes it in stride but i think it bothers him. he spends a lot of time outside. the little chihuahua aggressor is trying to drive all the competition out. maybe it's instinctive. or maybe he's feeling a little desperation at getting older and knowing his boy is hundreds of miles away. the boy will return at thanksgiving. maybe that will change his disposition. but unfortunately the boy, in his heart, has moved on. he couldn't keep this dog, and had to cut ties emotionally. now he can barely love him.

one of the dogs is an old lab, the only girl, loves the water, loves the cold, but is getting somewhat blind. when i take her for a walk she mostly balks and refuses to go anywhere. sometimes i just bring her back. you say you want a walk, but we get out there and you tug at me. i suspect i have put her harness on poorly or done something that she just doesn't like. but in fact i have no clue what i've done wrong. and sometimes, she'll go around the block with me. it's a very slow tug. she likes to smell things and once she gets started she doesn't want to be distracted.

my little white puppy meanwhile has become a little obnoxious. he always was a yapper, with a high-pitched, hard-to-ignore, screechy yap, but now he's found that if he gets on the couch and looks over at the street that is on the other side of the next-door house, he'll find such things as people walking dogs, loose dogs, people, things to bark at. and now that he knows it's out there, he's determined to bark at it. we tell him not to - we don't care who uses that street - but to no avail. i don't want to start hitting him. i also dislike barking back at him, just yelling until he backs off. with two of us yelling is that any better? no.

watching game two of the world serious tonight. i have taken houston's side and will stick with them though i like both teams. it's fun watching teams that are so good, even though we're on the cusp of november, and have no business trying to get out of a season as we go past saints' day and souls' day. i have strong feelings which i've expressed on my blog.

which reminds me, blogs are getting a little upgrade, just slightly better templates, better be-squares, that kind of thing. now that i've started it's hard to stop. it might be the time of year. if anyone looks at blogs, ever, i want them to enjoy the different links. time to weed the garden, so that the perennials have more space.

i've been going through my weblogs, updating the little squares on the be there-be square sections - this actually is one of my favorite parts of the weblogs. apparently a few years back i put some be there-be square sections on different weblogs and in general, the more you have out there the more you have to update. i am not only into using new weblogs these days, but also finding that many of the old links just plain became dead. no sense linking to dead places.

it's kind of an intricate coding problem setting up a little square that will sit there and be one of many, like in the template of this very blog, that link to all my favorite places. i like the fact that any of my blogs have these jumping off spots that are so visual, sometimes involving the faces of all my favorite people. i have to kind of get in the mood to fix them and create more though. in some cases it takes days. and once i'm out of the mood, then i'm done for years.

the colors outside have just gone past their peak with a huge number of leaves simply fallen to the point that they make a lot of noise wherever you walk. i consider this glorious although when it's wet, as it is now, there's potential for allergy, mold, etc. it's a real splay of color, though, at least for the moment, and past the peak is actually prettier in its own way than the peak itself. the dogs are loving it. it's a little treacherous, that they can poop and i'll lose it altogether, or just figure it's kind of hidden, which it is, but hidden isn't good for dog poop in big piles of leaves. that amounts to trouble. it's actually better to pick it up if i can, and put it in one of my plastic bags.

at the moment i'm wading through puritan leveretts, the first of my family books, which is not written with an eye to telling a good story, and which should be. i'm trying to rewrite it. as i reread it i notice that the writing is not so bad, a little repetitive, but where it loses out is that it's not really a great story. it's just a collection of facts. and it needs to b a story.

the world is big on football these days, and there's always the world serious, which should not be starting at halloween but should rather be long over by now. we are coming into what i consider the high holy days, the best of the best, the first few days of november which is actually the finest and prettiest of months. saints day, souls day, sadie hawkins day, election day, these comprise the best of holidays if only because the rust-brown colors that we are left with are by far the most beautiful of them. and oddly i'm absolutely the only person who feels this way.

there is no one i know with a birthday in this window, or no reason that i could have concluded this, aside from living sixty-eight years and deciding that this little window, the first few days of november, just happen to be my favorite time of year.

i guess i'll be watching baseball this year because hey, baseball, trains and banjo are the three best things there are. baseball is stupid to put its world serious in the high holy days but i have no control over that. i'll watch anyway, because it's baseball.

and do my squares, and my blog templates. chou

the orange leaves are everywhere - not only orange, but the ones which have turned brown already, and a few reds, and some greens that are also turning brown. they make a lot of noise under your feet. they're glorious, a splash of color.

our street is brick - actually, they relaid the brick a few years back so it's really classy brick that fits well; other nearby streets have the older brick, sometimes covered over. we're in the historic district. even the streets themselves are historic.

a house nearby has gone up for sale, and it caught my wife's eye, because they want about three times what we paid for ours. it's about the same size, same square feet, same three stories, but no doubt the attic is fixed up, or the basement remodeled, or some such thing. it's very victorian on the outside, like a lot of our neighbors. a kind of two-toned, pretty victorian, with the fancy kinds of things they put all over these houses. turrets, bay windows, that kind of thing. it's actually kind of amazing to study it.

in fact the whole neighborhood is full of such houses, in different shape, some falling apart, some kept up very well. some i think have already been completely torn down, leaving only an empty lot. our own house is kind of plain on the outside, no hint of two-toned painted glory, but it has a good wood floor inside and the feeling of the neighborhood, which we like. we hear the cars on the bricks outside. there are a lot of dogs in the neighborhood which of course sets ours on edge.

my writing is heavily slowed down by an enormous writing block. I started writing a novel that i had on my mind for a while, only to get a few chapters into it and realize i had no plan, i had no idea how it would turn out or even what the main action would be. you have to have a plan. you know where it's going, you can write it. i was an idiot to get so started that i didn't even think of it. one more for the "unfinished" pile which at this point is extensive.

my marketing however is showing signs of improvement. i feel like i do have readers out there and my numbers show that. i have a writer's block there too because i haven't really settled on a genre. as i read a wide range of stuff - mostly genres i don't care so much for - i get a sense of what's out there but also a strong sense that i shouldn't be wasting what little time i have left flailing around different genres that i don't care so much for. what am i doing messing around? i should get right to the point and do what i really want to do. but there is the problem. even in that regard, i really want to do half a dozen things.

i'll line them all up for you as soon as i can. i have two or three that are more than half done. the one i just started, unfortunately, may not make it past four chapters. the plan just isn't coming, and if it doesn't, it won't get written. the big one is the language book. if i do that before i die, i'll be happy.

i'm walking the dogs a lot, all four of them, most nights about a mile each. i'm watching all the baseball playoffs. i am taking kids to school and bringing them home. i'm doing dishes and my laundry. but a lot of times, i just sit here in my chair, reading some romance or fantasy, and getting the sense i'm throwing away my time.

then there are these blogs. you'll notice a little updating in the template - this is the big one - it has to have an updated template. right behind it is the professional blog which also needs a lot of care. but what i should be working on is the writing blog which is sadly undeveloped. wish me luck, so many blogs, so little time.

Wallace Monument, Scotland

monday morning, and all is quiet in the back half of the downstairs. my chair faces the dining room, and the morning light starts up outside those dining room windows, with my wife's plants crawling up the walls. the dogs are up and kind of eyeing each other; two of them aren't getting along so well these days. a third is parked very deliberately on my lap, where he can soak up everything he can. the weather has gotten steadily colder, with the leaves going through their bright orange phase and into the brown phase, outside. I love that; it's my favorite season. i can practically sit here in my chair and watch the leaves change.

i got all excited about the guardians the night they walked off victorious, in cleveland, beating the yankees and going up two games to one. but the following night the yankees came back and beat them, in cleveland, tying the series. so now they have to go back to new york to win it all. no matter; i think they can do it. i hope to be there. they are a young team, probably badly outclassed in both age and experience. but still it's great to follow them and baseball these days has been full of upsets. the padres just eliminated the dodgers, by far the best team team in baseball, so anything can happen. i hold out my hopes.

in writing i am in a kind of writer's block. nothing is flowing. i do fanatic marketing, no problem. i do a lot of reading. i keep track of my numbers like an accountant who has nothing else to live for. but i'm beginning to lose my patience with the numbers. so you have the numbers - what good does it do, if you have all this stuff to write, and you don't write it? i'm dying to write, but can't seem to do it. with my life full of interruptions and distractions, i haven't found a way to sit in this chair on an extended write-session and crank it out. and then when my wife leaves, and i have an hour or two or pure silence, i can't seem to use that effectively either. i'm just not focused well on a single goal. instead, i have about five projects on the table with none of them clicking.

what to do about it? not sure. for starters, i'll sit here and drink my coffee.

late at night, and i'm watching the padres-dodger game on computer, all the while trying to make a little progress with two books i'm reading. each is intense enough that i could not read it by itself. together they are still intense but at least there's baseball.

spent much of the day marketing which is why i got these two very-different, wild books to read tonight. now that i write about it, the ballgame is not really going to be enough to help neutralize what these two books do. one is the retelling of genesis, but with god telporting and christ trying to make peace with lucifer. it's funny in that they are all very human and even have bad grammar, which i'm sure to point out in the review. the other is pure smut; a poor guy becomes a slave and that includes being a sex slave. pure smut, as i said, but with good writing unlike the other. it moves better if it has decent writing. but the smut - ouch!

meanwhile the padres and dodgers are playing a pretty good game. it goes back and forth, dogs winning, pods winning, like that, but basically playoff baseball is the best baseball. i'm looking forward to guardians-yankees tomorrow; for some reason i was unable to catch it last night. and the guardians lost. maybe that was my fault. i need to be there for my team.

it's pretty tenuous, here, with the kids in school. it's hard for them to go back from a spring of lollygagging to a fall of five-days-a-week education. they are not used to learning or even sitting still.

and the small-town illinois trees have exploded in huge, outsized, colorful leaves falling everywhere, and some rain to make the whole thing slippery, and a kind of drizzle going back and forth around, sometimes very light, sometimes threatening more. it's kind of different (to us, from new mexico), and we're interested.

but i'll keep you up with everything later. go guardians!

late friday afternoon in galesburg illinois and my kids are home from school, relaxing or sleeping, glad for a long week to be over. my wife is getting a cat-scan which gives us both trepidation, her because her health is at stake and i because i love her dearly. as a result my fanatic read-marketing is difficult because i can't keep my mind on anything i'm reading.

a friend came to visit from iowa city; he'd actually been on the train to west virginia and was on his way back. he's an old friend, and we had lots in common, both having married powerful academic women and adopted cross-racially. it was interesting that we had that much in common but soon we found more. he stayed for dinner and went back to iowa with a handful of books.

the other day i got bagels and lox and a new york times just for nostalgia's sake, and got only a quarter of the way through the times when i got distracted by the stuff i have going on around here. i am actually operating on several levels, working on my marketing, and with all the distraction have put aside the history book i'm writing which really needs my undivided attention. i might be able to get to it this weekend - i should in fact be doing it now, while my wife is gone - but something has been holding me back. in times like this i turn to fanatic read-marketing and also a kind of paperback marketing, where i apply my skills to sinking money back into amazon to create more paperbacks in this world. slowly but slowly i'll fill the world with my own stories, so if you find a little free library it will almost certainly have my voice in it, but for now it's all i can do to fill the ones in galesburg.

i went to a cubs game around the first, actually on the first, took my son and took my other son who lives in chicago, and who is more of a sox fan, but nevertheless didn't mind a cool fall day in the friendly confines. the stadium wasn't full as both the cubs and reds are pretty bad this year, but it was a pleasant experience nonetheless, with the crowd drinking a bit and having lots of their ritual fun including singing and swaying to the music. the rooftops around wrigley all have bleachers on them and that actually expands the audience a bit. i thought of taking books down there, filling up little-free-libraries in the big city, but wasn't organized enough. organized means having the books ready, and knowing where to take them. this is more of a long term goal. i'm working on getting the books. for the most part they will be leftover books, made available by my changing covers and having newer ones to sell. and i'm working on that, too.

however i have a son coming in for thanksgiving, flying in to st. louis, and that will be another opportunity. one goes to cities every once in a while up here; it's not impossible, it's not even bad, you just get used to it, and all these towns have little-free-libraries which i need to familiarize myself with. it brings up what i consider an issue of the day.

the issue at its heart is that a lot of us book lovers, my age, are dying, and the books have nowhere to go. books are still inherently valuable, but we have generations that don't care much, and many of these books are at risk of being simply tossed in the dumpster. a nationwide network should be made to prevent their falling in the dumpster. another part of this movement would be to keep little-free-libraries stocked nationwide, particularly those which see action where people are actually reading. now i'm not sure if they actually get any action at all; this might be a pipe dream; maybe those l-f-ls are just sitting there looking pretty. but my point is that a national organization could oversee this and make sure that enough books get in the hands of enough people. it would be an interesting crusade.

i think it would involve having allies in different parts of the country, something i'm good at. and having allies who care about books - that's another one of my strengths. but finally, it would require some travel. for example, somebody dies and their relatives contact this non-profit. somebody comes and scoops up all the books. but some could be valuable. somebody else has to look through them to see what's there. the books have to find their way to a regional warehouse of some kind. somebody somewhere is keeping track of who has what and where, and also getting a book to someone who may want it somewhere. an arm of the charity sets to work putting the books on e-bay or some other place where people can see what's available. and what's left systematically goes out to the little-free-libraries, maybe, or fills up a free warehouse in a god-forsaken place that needs tourists.

in europe somewhere there is actually an entire village given over to books, and we could have one of the same - somebody buys up all the old buildings, sets to making them atmospherically desirable, then fills them with books - and of course the town has good coffee shops and maybe mountains and a river right outside of it. this of course would be paradise for places to live, the place to go, the place to while away the hours of one's life.

all a pipe dream too, except that in various iterations some people have actually made some of it happen. it is possible. one just has to focus on it a little.

cubs won. season ended. guardians made it to playoffs, and they won too, today, their first game. it's a fall that will energize me, if i make it through.