NPR's morning broadcast fills the kitchen, fills my breakfasting brother's mind with catchphrases, gives him things to think about. "President Bush," he says when I walk in. "Terrorist. Suicide. Bomb. Hurricane." "Don't worry about it," I say. "It's just on the radio. The music will come on pretty soon." Any mention of Princess Diana, whom he'd never heard of until her death, still provokes a range of very real emotional responses; he mourns her still, if you remind him.

We won't even talk about O. J. Simpson.

Brian is a sponge for current events. Some good comes of it. It gives us an opportunity to converse on subjects other than Star Trek. And Diana's death did unfix his scary fascination with Michael Jackson in introducing him to Elton John. (The first time he heard Candle in the Wind he burst into tears; he actually sobbed.)

Where was I? Things are warming up around here. No ice yesterday morning and temperatures reached 70+°F. So maybe we get a few weeks of First Peoples Summer now.

I have taken photos of progress at the bookstore, but I keep forgetting to bring the camera home so I can post them. The walls are turning a very dark intense brick red, think wet clay. I still don't know whether to paint the back wall a dark intense indigo, a dark intense teal, or go with my first idea of metallic gold. I was thinking I could just use the gold on the woodwork, doors, etc. The thought of painting all the shelving was sort of daunting until it occurred to me that I could rent a compressor and make quick work of it. I have no idea how to use one but it's time to learn, probably.

No frogs turned up in the water dish last night, I see (it's still clean), but as soon as I switched off the bed lamp the kangaroo rat was at the bookshelf plate of crumbs I put there every night now. He made quite a bit of noise, too, dragging bread crusts to his hiding place. (He's probably burrowed into the OED.)

What I remember of dreams is a family saga, hard to convey, an impoverished family, but the husband, a skinny wiry sparsely bearded guy, kept being arrested, kept going to jail for one reason or another, but his wife was always pregnant, always about to pop, it would seem he just had this need to knock her up whenever he had the chance and she was all for it, and they had all these barefoot kids running around, on up to teenagers. And the husband was injured, he was in a wheelchair, and the trauma of his experience had turned his hair bright white, and yet he was still innocent, still driven. And I got down on my knees in front of the wheelchair and leaned in and kissed his pale smooth lips, and again and again, longer, and then we just looked at each other for a while.

I think there's a message there about my creative impulse.

Today we drive out in a relaxed fashion, no hurrying to get places on time. To Davis Creek, to the transfer station (dump), to the bank. Then to the shop, where I will paint over the green finally with the last bit of that terra cotta red while waiting for a UPS delivery.