If I don't blog now before I leave here I'll probably lose this day. I'm reluctant to go, but I've always had difficulty breaking off one activity to begin another. I take a long time to go to bed, to stop reading, talking, sitting, gazing into space, whatever. I guess that's one symptom of my procrastination virus. Then too, consider what I'm doing: leaving the peace and solitude of myself, plunging back into the imperatives of the world. Try as I will to hang onto the peace, it ebbs, and so do I. "Give me my scallop shell of quiet.."

I didn't finish my book, as I had hoped. There was more polishing and correcting to do than I expected. I've been with it for so long, I have to be careful. There used to be a regular footer in the New Yorker - "Our Forgetful Authors" - in which inaccuracies were cited from the same book, things like forgetting the colour of a character's hair, giving the same information twice, losing track of the date or time or weather. I think computers compound these errors. Cut-and-paste jobs are so easy , and so hard to catch and delete. That's why God invented copy editors.

With these dreary thoughts, I'll wend (nice word) my way home.