Today is officially it. Temperatures here in the 40s and soft snow everywhere. Some puddles. The manure is slowly surfacing in the horse pen, as the top layers of snow melt off. Everyone seems to be in a good mood.

I spent some time this morning working on the BLBP business plan. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it because I did not have a lot of time, but because it was early, the editing went easier. Editing is a lot easier than writing. It’s easy to take one’s or someone else’s words, sentences, paragraphs, and say what needs to be said in a way that will better get the message across. I still have a ways to go, and I will work this evening and tomorrow morning. It’s not fun, but I am able to get into the zone, as I do with other types of writing.

I still haven’t figured it out, that is why grant writing is harder for me than creative writing. As I said yesterday, I have to give the matter a lot more thought.

I do wish that when I was working on my Ph.D., that I was allowed to focus on the composing process of writers. I would like to have studied neural anatomy and function, and actually looked at the mind at work, when writers were generating, revising, and copy editing their work. This is what I was most interested in then, and what I am interested in now. It does interest me that no one encouraged me to write about the composing process of writers. Well, I take consolation in the fact that I am cognizant of my own composing process, and that this enables me to get the work that needs to be done, done.

I worked with Cathy Stone at the Paler Senior Center on matting pictures from books. I’m getting the hang of it. I pick out illustrations and she matts them. But I did a few myself. As we were working, I had this absolutely brilliant idea, if I don’t say so myself. I have a box of Dr. Seuss books that have no more shelf life. We can mat these illustrations next week, and I can have an activity in which children write about, or at least tell stories about what’s in the picture. If they can’t write, I will write down their stories. THIS is literacy.

I am thinking about this sort of thing all the time now. In order for this project to survive, we need grant funding. And in order to get grant funding we need to define ourselves as a project that’s promoting literacy. Pete’s really leading the fray, getting the program going. Me, I’m just moving books around. I keep reminding myself that change is a constant, and that if you envision what’s to be, that is what comes to be.

I shared the draft of my cargo tricycle draft with Pete’s students. They were helpful. I have just a few changes to make, then off it goes, into grant cyberspace.

Next: 80. 3/22/24: Cursed Cursor