right now

Snapshot: It's 8 p.m. and I am, of course, sitting by the open back door in my kitchen, my belly full of dinner, which featured cherry tomatoes from my garden. There's a beautiful breeze. Yesterday was what summers usually are: very hot and muggy. Today, back to perfection - sunny and cool, with a hint of fall. It has been a fabulously cool summer.

I have to be careful when I deadhead the luscious Rose of Sharon bush - the huge mauve blooms, even when they're spent, are often inhabited by a drunk bumblebee staggering around inside, rolling in ... rolling in ... okay, I've forgotten the word for the yellow stuff on the pistils and stamens. How can I remember pistils and stamens, words I almost never use, and not -

Google.

Pollen.

Rolling in pollen and very very happy.

I guess this is going to happen more and more, so get used to it, be grateful for Google, and try not to think about the fact that your grandmother had Alzheimer's and liked to chat with Guy Lombardo when his band played on TV.

Very scary but let's not go there. Pollen it is.

Open on my computer right now: a short piece I'm writing for a Beatles book by my new friend Piers Hemmingsen; a new course description I'm writing for U of T; a NYT article entitled "The Drinker's Manifesto", of interest for some bizarre reason; an article by speech-writing expert Nick Morgan; and as always, checked a hundred times a day, my mail.

Around me as I sit are: the new New Yorker, where I'm reading a memoir excerpt by Lena Dunham. My new Letts of London daytimer from Laywine's. Various library books, including "A Field Guide for Immersion Writing," by Robin Hemley. An empty wine glass - dinner is over, though I may have another little tiny teeny bit as I read "The Drinker's Manifesto". And three notebooks with scribbles about various things.

Today, my friend and student Carol came over to teach me to tweet. I've been signed up for Twitter since 2011 but have never figured out how to use it - have sent 11 tweets in all that time, mostly to say "Hello, here I am, how do you use this thing?" But today, after an hour with Carol, I sent two firm, focussed tweets into the Twittersphere. We'll see if I ever do it again.

Yesterday I had coffee with Piers Hemmingsen. He's a banker with an MBA, but much more importantly, he's a kindred spirit Beatle nut who does a great deal of research on arcane Beatle related  things and writes books about them, his new book coming out in the fall. He has figured out, for example, how the OPP badge got onto the Sergeant Pepper's album cover. Things like that. He likes my book a lot, he says, though he is only on page 179. "It's important, it's funny and well-written, and it's unique," he said. "There's nothing else like it. And it's all correct!" That means a lot - this is a man who knows his stuff. Maybe we'll do a project together. But in the meantime, he says he'll write a review for a popular Beatle site. Music to my ears.

Beatle music.

Pollen. How could I forget pollen?

Over and out, as I fret. But I am not fretting as much as Lena Dunham when she was a kid. Hoo boy, she was neurotic. I'm just a little tiny bit, in comparison. And now for that glass.