Rainy days and Mondays…

…always get me down, back down under the covers that is, in close communion with my beat-up old down pillow. With the bed only about five feet away from my computer, the hypnotic patter outside the window and the sweet coolness of morning, all my ambition melts away and I want nothing more than to curl up with a book. One of those simple pleasures.


I'm reading "The Emperor's Bones" at the moment, by British writer Adam Williams about China in the 1920s, when the Japanese, the Chinese and Russian Communists and the warlords were duking it out for supremacy. My copy is hardcover, thick and heavy (664 pages), and when my eyes get tired and I doze off it topples onto my chest and wakes me up. But what can I do? The story has me mesmerized. Later there will be errands, but who goes out in the rain unless absolutely necessary? I'm self-employed, I have no office to go to.

Actually, don't tell anyone, but this morning at 4am I was outside in the dark getting happily soaked, watching the lightning show over the bay. It felt adventurous and refreshing and a little mischievous. Nobody was around to tell me I didn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

So now it's almost eight, and it's either a second cup of coffee or a siesta. Or maybe a siesta and then the coffee. We can have it all.