September 4. A few blown raindrops on the tarp this morning. Showers around noon. Been to Malone and shopped: a cast iron skillet for breakfast eggs, a folding table for Magic Cards, two new folding chairs, firewood. Yesterday was the actual holiday of Labor Day weekend, and we had to expect the worst.

Our neighbors: black-and-white camper and the usual two to three huge pickup trucks. They had several oversized, loudly barking dogs and yelled conflicting instructions at them. At one point, when the dogs almost freaked out because other dogs were around, one of them suddenly yelped abruptly; it was that unmistakable sound when a dog gets kicked.

We got two kinds of firewood: soft wood and hard wood. Hard was easier to get, and now we know why: it’s much harder to burn.

In the afternoon we rented a kayak at the lake and paddled across. J tells me later how annoyed she was at my awkward paddling, an annoyance I was oblivious to because I was sitting in front of her and she was completely in control of her anger. She realized that I couldn’t help it and was just paddling as well as I could, and anger certainly wouldn’t change that.

J feels that writing is the area where I am most definitely falling short of my potential. When it comes to running, I work steadily and systematically to improve. In music, I study what other musicians are doing and try to incorporate that into my own play. But she doesn’t see me studying other writers and trying to learn from them. She has been urging me for some time to take writers’ classes to expand my capabilities, and finds it incomprehensible that I have no interest in that. That must be something specifically German, she says, that you don’t think you can work on your writing systematically.