it's a restless day, i don't seem to be getting much done. it's a saturday afternoon, the house is empty except for a son holed up upstairs, and for some reason i have crickets in my ears which is my name for tinnitus, ordinarily much worse when my hearing aids are not working or out of my ears. perhaps they are not working. i haven't been hearing much either.

i have an extraordinary impulse to write the story of john the younger, an imperious president of harvard in the early 1700's, and i know plenty about him, and could probably sit down and do a fairly reasonable job just here in my chair, based on what i know. i'm coming up to his story in the rewriting of puritan leveretts but have got bogged down on some details and as usual, either you go all out and do the research, or you just figure you're not going to know everything and will have to put it down as you know it. this is my third or fourth time around on this stuff, pequot war, english civil war, oliver cromwell, restoration, hanging of the quakers, that's kind of where i am, but it draws me in like quicksand and then i can't do anything else. perhaps my impulse to write about john the younger is my youthful impatience to get all that witch-trial stuff behind me and just move on with other dirty 1700's-type details.

a couple of side notes on john the younger - he is not an ancestor, but had nine kids, of whom only two lived. those two were women and so no leveretts today claim john the younger as an ancestor. but he is still probably the best known of the leveretts, better even than his grandfather the governor, or frank the geologist, or my sister margot, or even me. he is famous. so my impulse really is partly to make a pretty good flag to put at the front of the entire operation. it would be book five of leveretts in the new world.

another thing about him is that my book eighteenth century leveretts has been interpreted as a biography of him anyway, and appears under biographies of educators in its rankings. i could make it more thoroughly about him, as he cast a huge shadow over the entire eighteenth century, but in a way i find these two cousins that went to harvard during the revolution far more interesting. they also are relatives, not ancestors, as far as i know, yet they led very interesting lives and the revolution truly stirred the pot for every family in massachusetts at that time.

i'm moving from project to project unable to settle on any given one. i've done plenty of reading, but still not quite enough, given that i've pledged out to six of them, way too many at one time, and can't seem to sink my teeth in enough to stick with one until it's finished. one is by a friend of mine, extremely well written, and even that one is hard for me to get my mind into as i've got all this puritan stuff going on and just can't relax into long sentences (her style). others i would be content to just flip the pages, as they aren't really going anywhere anyway. but i can't seem to settle. i keep thinking of this other stuff that got kindled somewhere in my mind, and it keeps me from being on a single path.

went out and picked up leaves for a while this afternoon. they'd been sitting in the front yard in piles, and now the grass is more exposed; it was looking pretty yellow when i got the leaves off of it. the leaves had placed a damp organic blanket over the whole yard; not sure if that's good or bad for it, but they're gone now. my arms got a workout, which was good, they were feeling ready to fall off for disuse.

the project you see beyond here is family pictures. deep inside this blog are pictures of my whole family. i don't label them at all but to me the whole point is that you should be able to find pictures of my family in here somewhere. so the secret to me is to make the links such that the pictures can remain unlabeled, yet will still show the astute visitor what they are looking for. it's a january project. i will work on it more as the month comes to an end.

back to the grind - six books on the table. ratings that are getting better. a few sales even. some reasons to enjoy staring at a sheet (newly updated, on saturdays) with a couple decent ratings. like i'm some kind of author.