Woke up about 5:30. Listened to a short dharma talk and a jazz podcast in bed. Up before 7. Breakfast/coffee. Shower. Expecting plumbers at 8 am; Bree and I prepared to stay in bedroom/office for most of the day (took lunch, water, &c.). Watched the end of a Lord Peter Wimsey adaptation; tried not to get involved in something else. Listened to 2 episodes of a basic but good podcast on classical Indian philosophy (specifically epistemology and logic).
Worked on bridge book 9:30-1 with some 10 min. breaks. Mostly small revisions on a 2K section of Ch. 1; decided to discuss UK usage of “middle eight” v. “Bridge” (aka pre-chorus). Found two good examples in The Guardian.
Took a break for an hr or so; came out of office briefly while plumbers were upstairs. Hard to accomplish anything in the interstices. Made more coffee. Therapy 3-4. Plumbers in and out a couple of times. Forced myself to spend 15 min. (W/ timer) on an email announcing our building’s annual meeting. (I’m secretary, but getting out of it next year.) Skimmed a review of Stephen Burt and Alfred Bendixen’s Cambridge History of American Poetry.
Watched a few minutes of the Michigan Board of Canvassers Zoom meeting. [They certified, 3-1, later in the day, and it looks like GSA Emily Murphy is going to sign the transition letter. I don’t see how it gets in front of SCOTUS from here. But what do I know?] Looked through the Vermont County Store catalog w/ Bree. Restful, unchallenging.
Leftovers for dinner. Read about 20 p. of Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World (aka the Aufbau) for seminar on Wednesday. Took a break to play piano for about 30 min. Fooling around with some altered scales over dominants, picked up from YouTube explainers, but I’m too lazy as of yet to work on it in all keys. Played through “Have You Met Miss Jones?”, “O Barquinho,” and “A Lot of Living to Do” (from Bye Bye Birdie). Finished Carnap chapter around 10:30. Defense of “constructing” psychological concepts from physical ones, and cultural concepts from psychological ones. Some analytic shade thrown at Hegel.
Brief walk outside around 10, per usual. Went to bed around 11:30, put on another of the Sutra podcasts.
Overall - not bad, given difficulty of working around plumbers. Also lost a couple of hours following the electoral situation. Writing again after a week off was slow, but it was a start, and I know what I want to do tomorrow.