November 20th. Maybe.

All week long, I was pretty convinced that swimming was over for the year. I’m not sure I even stuck a toe in the water. But yesterday the sun was shining, the air was hot… so yep, swimming on November 20th. Real swimming, floating, playing ball with the dogs for a solid two hours. It made me remember why I love living in Florida.

Today, though, has been a weird day. I’m not sure why my schedule is so skewed, but I woke up, did the normal morning stuff, came back to the bedroom to get my Saturday chores started — strip the bed, laundry, etc. — and thought, wow, I’m so tired, I’m just going to crawl back in bed for twenty minutes and think about what comes next in Grace before I get started.

I woke up at one o’clock. One! In the afternoon! I suppose it would have been worse if it had been one in the morning, but I have no idea why I suddenly needed four extra hours of sleep. The day’s been off ever since. I still haven’t done the morning chores, didn’t make it to the library, haven’t cleaned up the kitchen and it’s now almost 8PM and I’m finally writing my blog post. I haven’t written a word of Grace.

I did read an enjoyable Amazon First book, though: The Short Drop. If you’re a Prime member and you haven’t yet chosen your free book for the month of November, I recommend this one. I haven’t had a lot of luck with those books — some months, in fact, I haven’t even bothered to download one because I’ve grown so dubious about them. But this one was pretty solid. My sister called while I was in the middle of it and after a couple minutes on the phone with her, I had to say, “Sorry, even though I’m pretty sure it’s totally obvious why the missing kid went missing, I need to keep reading.” It dragged a little in parts and I skimmed some, and a bunch of the so-called plot twists were obvious from the beginning, but it was an entertaining way to spend an afternoon. Technically, for me, it means I again fell into the trap of reading fiction at breakfast, although it was almost 2 when I started. I still intended to only read a little bit and then get to work, but five hours later, yeah, not so much.

Ooh, and that thing I just did — the “yeah, not so much” — it’s called a contranym. The “yeah” in that context doesn’t mean what it ought to mean. I read a great article, What Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand? in The New Yorker about contranyms, and I love the concept.

A dog with an extremely dirty face is sitting next to me looking pleading. I’m not sure what she wants, but I should go see. And then I should start writing the words that count. 🙂