"Another Saturday night..."

I am baking, this evening.  Not this bread, exactly (it's clip art bread off the Web)...but my "white" bread that also includes wheat germ and instant oatmeal and sometimes a little cracked wheat for TEXTURAL INTEREST.  Didn't have any cracked wheat tonight, so it got bulgur instead (fingers crossed).  It's now in the second rise -- I find the oven with the light on is just the ideal temperature to make bread rise (or to get yogurt yogu-ing), without heating up the whole house.  Any more.  Than it is.

So now there is a little over an hour to accomplish something--else--before i have to go and attend to the final phase.  Meantime the dishes are washing...sun still quite high in the sky (eight p.m.), children playing in the back yard next door...

I have been moving piles of work material around from one desk to another, upstairs and down...you would think with three desks, two full-sized Old Oaken Office type and one good-sized ladylike corner type, I would not have to resort to the eternal dining-room table in order to get anything REAL done, but that is often the case.

Getting a lot of reading done the last couple of weeks and I have confirmed what I suspected, that I CANNOT READ BOOKS IN BED.  Magazines, all right.  But not books.  Luckily I have two good comfortable well-lit Reading Stations, one upstairs (that is, on the main floor) and one downstairs (for hot days).

And on the reading list, or heap, at present?  Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald.  Cheryl (Wild) Strayed's collection of the Best American Essays of -- some recent year.  Maeve Binchy's Evening Class.  Rick Perlstein's Nixonland.  Daniel Coleman's In Bed with the Word.  Ted Bishop's The Social Life of Ink. Ethel Wilson's Hetty Dorval and The Innocent Traveller. Lisa Deam's A World Transformed (on the spirituality implicit in mediaeval maps).  Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness. And Ann Patchett, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.  Oh yes -- a 1907 English translation (Everyman edition) of the Essays of Giuseppe Mazzini (yes, the "Risorgimento" Mazzini).

Should keep me out of the pool hall, don't you think???  Books, and bread.