Finally, yesterday, I started on my files. This is my last great effort while I’m alive, to gather and sort and file and send the detritus of my “career” to the Archives at the University of Manitoba, enough paper with my past donations to have a big bonfire along with the leavings of other unimportant people like me.

It’s a lot of work. The biggest, hardest part of the work is making the decisions. Used to be.

To keep or to toss, that is the question. It’s not really a question any more. I’ll keep most of the stuff, just for me, for my own pleasure, while I sill have my marbles. Some things are easy. Yesterday I threw out a big manuscript—well, not a manuscript—a print-out of a tale of a female Don Quixote (Dona Quixote). You know a about the Gutenberg Library, don’t you? it provides you with copyright-free (old) bools for you to research or enjoy, or both. You can download and print them to read at your leisure, which I intended to do and then never got around to reading more than one or two chapters. Most of my roads are paved with good intentions.

That’s as far as I got today, but I have finished a box!!! And that feels good.

I was a blank yesterday, took the whole day off, no swim, didn’t even dress, slept—not too much— but sat and read a lot and wrote a little. I’m not raring to go* today (never will be again) but I am better and I am anxious to complete my balcony arrangements (plants, soil, seeds, etc.). It’s getting warmer and will be lovely, I hope, by next week. And I have a lot of food to use up. I prepared too much for Kate but we kept going out and people brought us food and…tonight Matt and his roommate will come and have what I planned for Sunday dinner.

We just have to keep eating. Does anyone want some recipes?

Online dictionary: *…there was a window of time between 1833 and the early 1900s when “rare” was a variant to “rear” – also meaning “rise up”. Around 1909 – while “rare” still held this definition, it gave rise to “raring” – meaning “eager”. And THIS leant itself to “raring to go”.