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The weather around Sherwood Cottage remains gray. Even now, I hear thunder rumbling across the wind-swept plains, and I do not think it is a basketball team training. How much more rain will fall from it, I do not know. How much more the area needs, I do not know. Nor yet do I know how much more it can stand. I have not left Sherwood Cottage in some days, so I have not seen whether the rivers are yet swollen or the ground still flooded--save in this small place where I live and work, where no river flows and the ground is wet but not standing in water. Again.

I am not likely to leave today, either. I was not able to get as much done on my freelance work as I would prefer; even while Ms. 8 slept, I found myself distracted and less able to work that is my wont. As such, I have to complete the project today, squeezing out several thousand more words in whatever spans of sleep Ms. 8 allows me, or waiting until the Mrs. makes it home from her own work and tends to our daughter so that I can do mine. Combined with the rain and the fact that the Mrs. will take our one car to work today, it makes my venturing out far less than likely.

Normally, remaining at home and at work does not bother me. I have worked to make my home space comfortable for me, and the adjustments to it that continue to occur because of Ms. 8 need overseeing that I am not averse to offering. (Watching things change to suit her as well as her mother and me is interesting. The interaction of what the adults in her life provide her and how she manipulates those things provided entertains and amazes--and it occurs to me that I need to spend some more time considering the implications of what we give her. For if, as I have held--see here and here, among others--home is an externalization of the internal, I have to consider the shaping of the internal by the external. Ms. 8 crafts herself in part, as we all do, but only in part, as is true for all of us. How much and in what ways her grandparents and the Mrs. and I make her, and what it means that we do, needs attention.) Working is one of the few things I feel that I can do and be of some account--something else I have discussed at length in this webspace.

From time to time, though, I have the feeling that it is not enough. I tend towards being a hermit, but it is only a tendency; I am not thoroughgoing enough in it to be truly comfortable in isolation. (It is not the only thing for which it is true; I am "not enough" of a great many things, and it causes problems.) Today seems to be one of those days already; a nagging feeling of wanting something more or something else besets me. Unfortunately, I cannot indulge it. I cannot afford to, either in myself or in terms of the selfishness implied. And so I will set aside the feeling once again and get back to work, now that I have cleared out what needs clearing.