It is very windy here today and has been since last night. Beta had difficulty falling asleep and so she drank some hot cocoa before bed and sat up reading for a while. Gamma fell asleep okay but talked in her sleep alot during the night, according to my wife who apparently didn’t get a lot of sleeping in either.

I slept well, on the other hand. This morning I made coffee and fed the cats, at least the one who came home in the morning, but he didn’t like his food so I petted him for a while until he accepted the fact that he wasn’t getting anything better and climbed off my lap to go eat a little after all. I made lunches for the kids and put away clean dishes from the dishwasher and drank coffee and ate some cottage cheese and talked to Alpha for a while. Then I got up to wake up Beta and turned off a light that was in the cellar. When I sat back down at the kitchen table I couldn’t remember whether I had woken up Beta so I went back upstairs and woke her, either for the first or second time – she couldn’t remember either.

I felt like that tertiary character in “50 First Dates” who keeps introducing himself to people every 10 seconds because his short-term memory doesn’t last any longer.

Wind is my least-favorite weather. Even toads and locusts would be better, because although they are officially plagues, at least they are rare and interesting, at least where I live. Wind, however, blows my car around the street and I also have to park it beneath trees where I work – all the streets within walking distance are tree-lined, which is nice on a calm summer day but on mornings like this not so nice – branches were already covering the streets when I parked and I figure there’s a 50:50 chance something substantial will fall onto my car during the day.

Two deer sightings this morning, though. I had expected they’d all be in the woods, out of the wind, but there were two in the first field and three in the second. I pointed them out to Beta, who gave them a glance before returning to her book, “The Collector” by John Fowles. She dislikes the main character mightily. I told her to concentrate on the style, because it’s marvelous, and on the vocabulary, because one can learn a lot of new words reading John Fowles.

We also studied the sunrise extensively on our drive into town. The wind had scoured the atmosphere clean and stretched out the clouds and it was all quite intense and brought me right back up against the window of my soul.