So we waved her goodbye and drove to our new favourite organic fruit and veg market shop... which, we discovered, was closed on Sundays. Well, who knew. But I need to get some salad fixin's for to make a salad for the 4th of July BBQ we've been invited to so I'll go scooting back tomorrow morning for those. No prob.
Came home, had a lovely home afternoon, and the day was just perfect, perfect, perfect - one of those summer days when it's warm but not sweltering, and I would up sitting outside on the deck in the shifting shadows of our big maples, reading, while squirrels of different species and a bunch of bluejays skirmished for possession of the feeder and deer wandered through the bottom of the garden. Then I came in, and we had supper, and we watched some TV, and now I'm here checking mail and generally taking a bit of down time before, tomorrow, I return from my salad-fixins trip and settle down to finishing chapter 11. After that, I have only four more chapters to go and I think i can manage to do that by the first week of August. WHich gives me a week to go through the whole MS, fix first-pass boo boos, and basically send it off to New York before I leave for ANaheim on the 22nd.
Heaven day.
If I may wax philosophical for just a moment here, this is the kind of day that centers me. I am... someone specific, someone with a defined life, defined rewards, defined responsiblities, I have friends who think nothing of crossing three counties to come and spend a few hours with me, and that makes me very happy because I treasure such friends and I am proud and grateful that they reciprocate. I spend time with a life-mate who loves me and whom I love, and that is immeasurably wonderful, because on some level I am deeply aware of how many people never get that chance. I have a home which I am positively in love with, and I cannot even speak of the pure and golden contentment of just sitting out there on the deck in the midst of the summer woods and basically...dreaming. I have a life's work which I love doing, and which I am still gobsmacked at this particular life's consenting to be lived by me. If it all collapsed tomorrow I think I could go on knowing that somewhere, somehow, someway, the Gods of Destiny have consented to give me a single sip of what must be the elixir of paradise.
Happy days, everyone.