I just can’t read from…

I just can't read from dawn to dusk, straight through. Can't do it. Or at least, I'm not yet in that state of panic which makes it possible. Yesterday, I read all morning, but then Roshani and I went shopping for groceries and household stuff for a few hours, before I came back and read the rest of the day. And it was fun, and I'm glad I did it, and I'm just hoping I won't be needing those three hours before my exams...

We spent a long time at Home Depot -- she bought massive plants for $5.99 each, and I'm sort of sorry I didn't pick up one or two myself, but I felt like I had enough stuff already. Might go back and get one. My plants are starting to actually grow again -- they just kind of hung in there over the winter, but with the longer days (and brighter light?) of spring, they're starting to actually get happy again. I might even need to get a bigger pot for my lemon balm soon, which I find just astonishing, given that it's growing on a sunless city windowsill.

I picked a curving glass shelf for the bedroom wall, which is sadly barren at the moment, and replacement light bulbs for all the burned out ones (now happily replaced, yay), and picked up masses of paint sample cards. There are all sorts of walls I want to paint. The bedroom (sorry no photo yet), in shades of blue and grey. The front hall, in a dark blue shading to indigo. And the tv room (probably just the wall not pictured, the one behind the couch), but I can't decide whether I want a rich red or a dark sage green there. At some point today I'm going to go across the street to the little hardware store and see if I can get a taller ladder there; ours is insufficiently tall, and it'll be a pain if I have to try to bring a tall one home from Home Depot in my car or Kevin's. Manageable, I'm sure, but a nuisance. Once we have the ladder, various projects can be knocked off quickly -- replacing the broken ceiling fan (so I can sleep better, now that it's getting warm at night), hanging drapes to cover the bedroom window and block the light, ditto sleeping, but this time for Kevin, putting up that shelf I bought, and painting the walls.

And all of this with bits of Baldwin running through the back of my head. I keep wanting to quote bits to you, but the problem is that he rarely talks in sound-bites. I'd need to give you massive long paragraphs for it to make any sense, and you'd still lose the subtlety of his overall essay, and it would take a long time to type in and I probably just shouldn't. But if you're at all interested in race in America, this guy is clearly one of the incredibly important ones to read -- and if you're a writer, he has a lot of good things to say about writers too, and the way they interact with society.

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