Friday evening I dithered a lot and never got around to fixing any dinner, then around ten o'clock I felt very tired and decided to take a nap. I picked up a magazine to read in bed, expecting to drop off after a few lines, but the article I started turned out to be so engaging that I read the whole thing and never got to sleep. It's Ann Patchett's long personal essay "These Precious Days" in the January issue of Harper's, and I highly recommend it. It's the story of an unexpected friendship she developed and which came into full being during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.
I was going to fix my skipped meal, but I find I'm still dithering, and it's getting pretty late and I really should be making something less elaborate than I'd planned on having, and in these circumstances I usually end up just microwaving a ramen bowl. I really must get my cooking act together earlier tonight, or the fresh stuff I got Monday will start to rot.
There is some bad news about the western monarch butterfly population; Their population crashed this year, and they might be headed for extinction. I remember how many I used to see in my yard when I was a kid. Sometimes there'd be a dozen or so at a time, and hardly a day would go by during their season when I didn't see at least a few. It's hard to imagine California without them. But maybe I'll get lucky and die before they go extinct. Even at that I doubt I'll ever see one again. Two years in Chico I've not seen a single one.