Ordinarily on a Monday like this, I think I might moan about lack of sleep and too much work to do in too little time. And I do feel that way, but I'll refrain from moaning because I also still have the residual good feeling left over from Sunday, so you don't have to hear about all the phone calls that interrupted me just when I was about to finish some pointless menial task, so that I had to back up and go over the same ground over and over until I sunk up to my neck in the muddy rut. I'll try to remember to get back to that next Monday. Remind me.

In the post office this morning, I saw a prudent young woman put a latex glove on the hand she used to reach into her mailbox. She had one of the largest boxes (the one just under mine, in fact), and it held mostly oversized envelopes and small packages. She dumped everything into a plastic tub and hauled it off to her car. We had a post office here in town close for awhile last Friday, because of some white powder that turned out (of course) to be harmless. Whoever is sending the real anthrax is making it awfully hard for people who want to stick some talcum powder in an envelope and mail it.

Suzanne came by this afternoon to pick up a CD she wanted to use at school. She and John got back yesterday from a cruise to Mexico, and she brought me a muy cool Cabo Wabo T-shirt and a cassette by a fiddler they saw on the ship, a guy named Billy Armstrong. What she wanted from me was my Latin party CD, because it has "The Macarena" on it. The only problem is, once I put it on the player, I realized it was the racy half-English dance version of the song. So she's probably still going to have to find a different version that's more appropriate for preschool children.

By the way, that's not Billy Armstrong the silent film comedian, or Billy Armstrong the Pittsburgh restaurateur, or Billy Armstrong the mountain bike racer, or Billy Armstrong the Ulster politician. It's Billy Armstrong the Academy of Country Music fiddle player of the year for every year from 1965 through 1977.

My landlord spent the weekend clearing, digging and grading the area just beyond my back fence. He didn't bother to do anything on my side (although he had to take part of the fence down drive through a corner of my yard).

It must be maddening to the people of New York when folks from outside the city fail to understand, on the deep level that New Yorkers understand, what it means to have its distinctive skyline so violently and abruptly altered, to have its most visible feature suddenly gone. The New York skyline wasn't something I thought much about before September 11, but as I watched the documentary film New York, by Ric Burns, on PBS over the weekend, it kept flashing forward from the historical footage to the "present," as it was while the skyline was intact. For the first time I felt a twinge of what must be the constant ache of anyone who knows and loves the city.