Peacock of Flourish

I'm still not quite back to normal, but feeling some optimism. After finally sleeping a whole lot--long nap yesterday, long night last night--I think I'm getting better. At the price of a week of doing abso-blooming-lutely nothing. Bah. Well, that's not quite true. I have done a lot of Zooming and chatting with various people, and transcribed a couple of ancient pieces of writing into the cloud, in case I lose my hard copy. It was so funny to be retyping a piece printed out on a dot matrix printer, on that paper that was state of the art at the time, that had perforated margins that carried it through the machine and then had to be detached. I am old. I could see everything that needed changing, and my fingers itched to edit as I typed, but no--the whole point was to preserve the original. I pulled myself together enough to cook dinner: that beef stroganoff thing that the Sparrowhawk likes, steamed broccoli, mashed potatoes, and corn on the cob. I was even able to eat some of it. So far so good.

The weather is very pleasant these days. We had a little rain last night, and may have a little more tonight. During most of the year, the autumn clematis is a green monster that overruns everything, does its best to strangle the rose bush and the lavender, and falls over with its trellis every time a high wind blows; but for a couple of weeks in late August or early September, it justifies itself with a wave of starry flowers, thick as a snowdrift and perfuming the air. And that sentence is a tribute to my former self, who was ENTIRELY too fond of semi-colons! I didn't understand why everyone did not embrace this most charming and useful of punctuation marks. But now, sadder but wiser as I am, I can see that I overdid it just a tiny bit.