Normally, the water from the coffee machine in which my tea now steeps isn’t hot enough to burn my lips and tongue when they touch it. The fact that my lips are smarting right now tells me the water is hotter than normal.

K’s gone to New York on a one-way ticket with the only computer we own that doesn’t complain of arthritis when it’s turned on or suddenly turn off of its own accord, which means I am effectively liberated from the Internet in the evenings. For several reasons besides this her absence is not good, and there is a chance she won’t be back for a while. Actually, the note I found on my pillow this morning said she wasn’t coming back at all, but It’s possible I’ll be following her any day, in fact, or perhaps next week, but I’m on standby until then. The cats and I will miss her terribly.

Meanwhile, I plan to read a lot, especially of The Golden Bowl, which by the way isn’t fast reading, but I might end up otherwise preoccupied.

Update: It would be perfectly reasonable to conclude from the above that K has left me, in the sense that, say, after eight months of my promising to hang curtains in the bedroom, out of frustration she abandoned me to lazy forlornness. In fact, nothing like that has happened: she is in NY for a family emergency, which entails all of the “not good” things implied above, including the uncertainty about if and when I will join her. You have to admit, though, frustration-for-the-sake-of-the-curtains would have been a good story, even better than K’s suggestion that I cop to having had a girlfriend: either would have made for good gossip, but the curtains would have been worthy of a Johnny Cash song.