Monday

Grey and dreary and damp ALL F*&#ING DAY. Good god. Have been catching up on past issues of The New Yorker, always happy to find a short story by Alice Munro. Read Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, which begins with one of the great first sentences -- "This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” It was an interesting read, full of People Behaving Badly.

One Christmas cactus is blooming (beautiful white flowers with a pink blush), the other is not. Oh well. It bloomed last year (pink-red flowers with a white blush), so perhaps it is taking this season off.