Heading up to Seattle today for a 10-day house-sit, while we’ll have a sitter here. I lived in Seattle in the early 80s after getting an English degree in California, and put it to use there as a copywriter for an outdoor equipment company. I liked Seattle a lot, but the rainy winters put mold on the neck of this California boy, so I returned to the Bay Area. Looking forward to the visit, and all those beautiful waters of lakes and the Sound.

I had a tentative writing assignment on vintage boats there from the magazine that published my article about John Steinbeck and Doc Rickett’s Sea of Cortez excursion, but the editor has ghosted me since we first discussed it, which is lousy.

Today I had my eighth conversation with Tanya, a Ukrainian woman hoping to improve her English skills. I am volunteering for ENGin, a program to help Ukrainians learn conversational English. Some students are refugees like Tanya, who lives in Poland (though she still visits Kyiv), but most are still in Ukraine. We will meet once a week for an hour for at least six months, and talk about everything under the sun. Today we played word games where I wrote out sentences and scrambled the words so she had to piece together the sentence from out-of-sequence language. It was fun.

My neighbor May, who we have known for 25 years here is leaving this Saturday, and we are sad—she’s been a fine neighbor. But now she is infirm, and her family is moving her to their place in San Jose, though she doesn’t want to go. She is an orchid grower (and cloning orchids was her business for years), and has given Alice many beautiful plants over the years. She loves cats, and below is an illustration of a fetching kitty I colored in with bright pencils for her.

I am sending out some more article queries—I have a new good one on how experienced divers can dive down past 100 feet in a flooded nuclear missile site in Washington state. One of Alice’s diver friends just did it, and I hope to land an assignment. Otherwise I’ve been letting my Jack Daniel’s correspondence memoir languish, because lately I’ve been that thing you never want to have around, a moody writer.

Enjoy these end-of-summer days (and nights).

Updated September 4, 2024

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