first paddle

this morning me and the mister took our first paddle of the season and the first one with my favorite canoe in two years (needed a new skin and all). Oh it was so very pleasant. The water was still and there was a virtual flotilla of jellyfish doing their very unique water ballet. There were black ducks and cormorants and a heron and most excitingly a battle between a murder of crows and one osprey - we think perhaps the crows were robbing the osprey's eggs - quite a racket! We went as far as the wrecks which become more sea than boats every year. We paddled over the deck of one - a bizarre sensation.

Then home and low and behold there was Gwen's car in the drive. She'd said three but came at ten. So we worked and I've been working again since lunch (now six). I'm one hundred pages into the re-write - I'm at a murder scene and it is quite fun. I think at this rate in two weeks or so I'll have the readers' draft ready. But I am not sure because...well...I've never quite done this before - not this way.

I am reading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. I read it years ago and it is so completely hilarious. I am so jealous of a truly gifted comic writer. For those of you who have never partaken of this master-piece it was published in 1931 and is a parody of the Gothic country novel, the dark sensuality of Lawrence and faux colloquialisms of Sussex country people are set-up against the cool know-how of a positive thinking Cecily-type (The Importance of Being Earnest). It is too clever by half and has me hooting wildly when I read it.
here's a bit I must share. In it Flora (the Cecily type), who has come for an extended visit to her distant relatives in Sussex, has just found out that the hired girl is in labour for the fourth time and won't be able to wash the terribly dirty curtains in her room - she is talking to her cousin Judith who she has just met:

'What - without a doctor or anything? asked Flora, in alarm. 'Hadn't we be better send Adam down into Howling for one? I mean - in that grim-looking hut and everything - '
Judith again made the blind animal gesture of repudiation which seemed to thrust a sodden wall of negation between herself and the world of living things. Her face was grey.
'Leave her in peace...animals like Meriam are best alone at such times...'Tes not the first time.'
"Too bad,' said Flora, sympathetically.
''Tes the fourth time,'whispered Judith, thickly.'Every year, in the fulness o'summer, when the sukebind hangs heavy from the wains...'tes the same. And when the spring comes her hour is upon her again. 'Tes the hand of Nature, and we women cannot escape it.'
('Oh, can't we?thought Flora, with spirit, but aloud she only made such noises of tut-tutting regret as she felt were appropriate to the occasion.)
'Well, she's out of the question, anyway,'she said, briskly.
'What question?' asked Judith after a pause.
She had fallen into a trance -like muse. Her face was grey.
'I mean the curtains. She can't wash them if she's just had a baby, can she?'

Isn't that just the best!
OK. Back to my book for a bit. Then S.P. and I will watch two or three more episodes of West Wing.
Oh and we voted today.
Yikes.