It's Sunday morning, 10 a.m.

and I am sitting on my bed (made), books spread around me, a tray with the last mug of tea from this morning's pot (tea is my husband's department, both the choosing of and the making of) and a dish of roasted almonds, ready to write: 1) another page from Hélène Cixous's wonderful new book  Défions l'augure, which Seagull Books will publish eventually, in English; and 2) some poems of my own for my next book, should I be so lucky as to have 'a next book.'

(But I have a title for it, after a story in the NYTimes, last week: 'How to Have Sex in a Canoe.')

It's cool, sunny, getting hotter...but when I read about the temperatures in Europe at the moment, I thank heavens for coastal Northern California's fog and cool overnight temperatures. My husband has gone biking with a friend. Yesterday the two of us rode up Alpine almost to 'The Green Gate,' a landmark for bikers at the top of Alpine, where the road has been closed for x years because there was a landslide. It doesn't go to Skyline Bd (the road along the ridge with the Pacific Ocean to the west and Silicon Valley and the SF Bay to the east) any more. It's the first time I've tried to ride up that far, and we had to turn around more because it was getting late, and dark, especially under the Redwoods. A beautiful road with almost no traffic, wild, steep hills on one side and a drop into a valley where a creek is still running (where does the water come from? It hasn't rained for a couple of months) on the other. Sublime.

Too late to stop at the Alpine Inn for a beer.