I hate stink bugs

Dear family and friends,

I have a pretty open attitude to nature. I ooh and ah at gorgeous scenery. I coo at every dog or cat I come across. I carefully remove spiders from the house and put them outside. But I cannot stand the beetles that somehow get into the house. They are so weird. Suddenly, they are there. You don't see them arriving. A bunch were crawling outside my bedroom windows earlier in the fall, and I said, good, let them stay there. Suddenly there was one inside, having compressed herself into the tightly closed, seemingly nonexistent space in the jamb. You can't crush these stinkers; they compress without trouble. The only way to get rid of one is to throw it in the toilet. I have found three on ME! Ugh. I have found one in my bed in the middle of the night: half asleep, I moved my hand and came across a hard little thing. I brushed it off the bed, turned on the light and went around to see what it was. A beetle. It went in the toilet. As you can imagine, they are very slow. Merwin missed one on the bed light, and it simply disappeared, only to appear later on ME! What are they? Why are they?
. . .
Better day today so far. Yesterday was terrible—the price I paid for the two days of activity on Sat and Sun. I was exhausted. I managed to answer some emails and do some reading, but I felt totally wiped out. It's hard to understand why sitting and enjoying music should be so exhausting when all I am doing is listening. On Sunday, I had to lie down in the pew behind us for a while. I still have hopes that I can meet my writing group friends at Nassau Community College on Thursday AND go to the City on Friday. I would very much like to see our cousins, who will be in the City for about 24 hours. But one day at a time is my mantra.

Merwin is out pushing the snow off the driveway, our first snow of the season. The street is already bare from the traffic. Well, it's pretty, but I probably won't go for a walk today. I hope to do some work for hamletworks.org. Last evening, Jesús phoned from Spain. It was almost midnight, his time. He has so much to do, his teaching, administrative work, scholarly commitments to complete—and a family to enjoy, a boy and girl, Pau and Carme—plus a dog! Xelo, his wife, also teaches full time has just started a new commitment to earn another college degree with a major in French, English and other language studies. Jesús wanted to know how Merwin is doing, and he also wanted to talk about his modernized Enfolded Hamlet, which is an all-new edition of the play based on my invention, an old spelling Enfolded Hamlet. His edition, like mine, will be on hamletworks.org, and I think his will be easier for many users, who could have difficulty with the old spelling and orthography of my edition. Every line of both his and my version is connected to our team's textual and commentary notes for that line.

Knowing and loving Jesús and family are among the great perks of my discipline, Shakespeare studies. We are connected to people all over the world—Europe, South America, Japan, Australia, and the USA of course. We have visited many of our friends in their homes, and we have been delighted to have our friends visit us. Our beloved friends form France, Michèle and Raymond, are hoping to visit us in the spring—a great event to look forward to.

Happy thoughts!

Love to all,
Bernice