I am tired tonight. Tired enough that I believe I could lay my head down on my writing table and go straight to sleep. Over the past several days, Ray and I have been tackling lots of the toughest spots we have here in Texas. Hauling lots of furniture and boxes out of our barn to sort; clearing out an open trailer filled with discarded bricks from a chimney up on our roof; heading down to our nearby mid-century building at 7 this morning to power spray the peeling paint off the edges of the concrete roof in preparation for our friend, Darrah Dunn, to apply a sealant that we hope will bring new life to a historically significant building here in our small Texas town.

For me, I lead two lives while here. For the first part of the day, I do lots of physical labor; during the second half, I am on Zoom, working with students on high school, college, and graduate school essays. Yesterday, I moved furniture and boxes in and out of our barn, went to the City landfill twice to throw away two pick-up loads of trash, then came home, took a quick bath, slept an hour and then began working with one student applying to Wharton Business school at Penn, another applying to law school and a third, who needed essay help on SlaughterHouse Five. Today, I unloaded a covered trailer, then loaded the bed of a pickup two times with boxes before heading home to work with one student applying to dental school and another submitting her application of her residency in Internal Medicine. In between, I quickly chopped vegetables to throw into my handy-dandy InstantPot so we could have chicken and vegetables for dinner.

Ray is as busy as I am, except more single-focused. Well, not really. Yesterday, he was figuring out how we were going to get that pesky paint off the edge of the roof while fielding calls from Ojai about why our well wasn’t working while sorting through boxes from our barn.

When you only have limited time in a place, you’d be amazed at just how productive you can be!

Heading up to bed now.

I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.