What I will do, chowder and travelogue.

1. Writing my goals for the week in a notebook, and looking forward to my writing work.

2. I love the golds and creams and bright yellows of corn chowder. And I like the salty-sweet taste, too.

3. We listen to the first part of Hothouse, a far-future coming-of-age tale about life on an Earth that has been taken over by carnivorous plants. I'm very fond of travelogue-style science fiction stories that give you a whole new world to explore.

Got to go, the milestone and story.

1. He says as we wake up on a work day: "I hate leaving you."

2. She says that her little girl has reached another milestone. "Now she cuddles me."

3. We listen to H E Bates' gentle and affectionate story, The Maker of Coffins on BBC 7.

Post, blackcurrants and nuns.

1. We are woken by the fall of a fat pile of letters. When I investigate, I find a wedding invitation among the magazines and bills.

2. The smell of blackcurrants cooking into their own deep red syrup.

3. All day, we've been telling each other that we're going to listen to "the nuns" -- the second batch of Sacred Hearts episodes. It's a historical drama set in a Renaissance convent, a dark love story with a tense setting where reason and religious hysteria collide.

I'm really hoping no-one noticed the paid-for text link to a printing service that I put on the sidebar on Tuesday and took down yesterday. It turns out that it was connected to a scam involving free business cards.

If you ordered anything from the site concerned, go to Hubbers' blogpost for more information on what the scam is all about, and what you need to do.

I dropped the ball on this one, for which I apologise. I feel terrible, particularly because I would normally do a thorough check before agreeing to such a link. A quick Google search would have told me all I needed to know. The company often sends leaflets in Amazon parcels, so I guess I let that familiarity cloud my judgement. Also, with redundancy hanging over my head, I was a bit too eager to snap up the payment they offered.

Once again, I am very sorry, particularly to anyone who has been inconvenienced. I will be more careful about who I choose to work with in future.

1. Wet day. Someone has rubbed the town's pencil lines with their thumb until the background has disappeared and the foreground is more of a suggestion than actual houses, buses and people.

2. Glass green lettuce in a blue-and-white bowl.

3. I have been looking forward to the Ted Chiang story (72 Letters) in Steampunk, a wonderful Vandermeer anthology. I love Chiang's thoughtful, beautiful stories. I find myself turning them over and over long after I've finished reading. He works very slowly and meticulously -- his body of work is tiny -- and it shows in the polished finish and the way the complex concepts have space to work their way into the reader's mind.

Blue book, emptying a bag and going nowhere to do nothing.

1. I come home from work and find a parcel -- Fiona Robyn's The Blue Handbag. I've joined her 100 Readers project. Once I've finished reading and done the interview, I need to pass the book on to someone else. I love the idea of books being re-read by a whole succession of people. If anyone likes the sound of it, let me know and I'll pass it on to you.

2. Tipping the last quarter bag of compost into a new planter. I like the dead weight pouring and tumbling away.

3. One of the other students in my art class says her daughter has been camping in Spain since March -- just relaxing on the beach, eating and sleeping. She felt she'd never had a gap year, so she and her fella went out there to stay until their money ran out.

The first moments, covered and a stolen child.

1. I step outside to pick up the milk and check my pots of seeds. The air is so still and cool and the day so full of possibilities.

2. A flowering shrub in the middle of this front garden has an old curtain thrown over it to keep the cold off.

3. We find frogspawn in the nature reserve pond. She tells me that when she was at junior school, she stole a single jellied egg from the class's tank and took it home in her drink bottle. Her mother was very cross and said: 'Well you'd better look after it.' So she raised a little frog.

Story teller, better with two and read to me.

1. The podiatrist offers a fistful of stories about miracle cure anxiety, lost and found dogs and a bag of swag stashed under the roots of an oak tree.

2. On the train: A lady talks anxiously into her phone about how to get to the passport office. 'I left in such a hurry this morning I didn't have time to check the details. It's near Victoria, isn't it? Globe House?' There's no help for her at the end of the phone, though, and the conversation ends. Then a voice pipes up from the seat behind: 'Sorry to listen in, but are you going to the passport office? I'm going there, too.'

3. Cat hands me my favourite goddaughter and a book called The Smartest Giant in Town. She says: 'I always hear this in your voice for some reason.'

Get out, stuff it in and twice lucky.

1. I have somewhere to be, so I get permission to leave a couple of minutes early. It's good to walk out when I've finished my work, rather than spending the last ten minutes pretending to be busy.

2. Pete describes, complete with expressions, encouraging his small son to eat six quarters of brussel sprout while his wife's back was turned.

3. Rolling two natural twenties in a row.

Then, a conversion and the curve.

To Den -- I've posted some sewing pictures here and here.

Larkspur nominated me for a Superior Scribbler Award. For great writing, you should check out Fiona Robyn's A Small Stone and get some reading recommendations from Tania Hershman's The Short Review, or from The Fix.

1. I love to hear James' mother describing us all as teenagers -- she tells Nick that I was 'one of the ones that looked me in the eye and responded to my greeting' instead of scurrying through the kitchen with my head down.

2. A s-shaped scar on the top of his head has changed his life.

3. The head waiter's tail coat is buttoned over the curve of his belly.

Green stone, in flight and dinner.

1. The jeweller shows us deep green stones that I think are emeralds. She puts me right -- they are tsavorite, a sort of garnet.

2. We go to Nick's favourite shop to choose him a Christmas present. The owner laughs at us, and tells me the story of the wife who came in and said: 'I'd like a book about a type of aeroplane called a Spitfire. Have you ever heard of it?'

3. He looks down at his plate and says: 'It never fails to amaze me how you can take some leftovers that have been hanging around in the fridge for half a week and a few old vegetables and make a wonderful meal.'

Veils, boing and yes dear.

1. In a flowershop bucket, anemones hide deep red and purple petals behind a lace of green sepals.

2. An unattended rubber ball bounces down a London street, noticed only by Caroline, who points it out to me.

3. Hilary tells a true story that makes me giggle every time I catch her eye. It involves 93-year-old charity shop volunteer who was so short-sighted that she whipped out a magnifying glass whenever anyone asked her to look at something. One day, a flasher came into the shop... and I think you can see where this is going.

Autumn leaves, come and see and this is how it's going to be.

In answer to some comments:
Sprite: yes, I was at the thread and yarn show at Ally Pally -- my housemate had a stand there.
Chrissie: I think of punctuation as breaths or pauses -- a comma is a short pause; a semicolon is longer; a colon is longer still; and a full stop is longest of all to mark the end of a thought. I use semicolons in lists, too, if the items are more than one word. I try to write as I would (like to) speak -- my lips probably move as I type! I think a lot about the rhythm of prose, which is probably why I scatter semi colons so generously.
Sandy Kessler -- I think Blueridge Muse must have found the ideal place to live!

1. Walking through the park I pass the Turkish Oak. Its large leaves have nearly all come down and they cover the ground so thickly that the grass is not visible. A mother and two tinies are flinging handfuls of coppery leaves at each other and giggling hysterically.

2. On our way to breakfast I make Fenella walk up the steep street to the park so she can see the leaves. 'I can see them from the window,' she says. But when we get there, she gasps.

3. Over dinner we bat ideas back and forth for a steampunk-hollow earth game. Tim and I are all up for a trip to the Antarctic -- 'And there'll be dinosaurs, and they're going there to rescue a previous expedition that got lost and to bring the word of god to the natives...'
'It's set in Hertfordshire,' says Nick, who is running the game.
There's a pause while we digest this improbable fact. 'What, there's an entrance to the hollow earth in Hertfordshire?'

The space, hanging and twice told tales.

1. Waking up in the vast expanse of Nick's new sofa bed. I have to roll over to find him.

2. We breakfast outside at a coffee shop. We watch a girl little enough to still have baby hair swinging on the bike rails -- they are just the right height for her.

3. We meet James and Kim for lunch and a catch-up. Old news for us is new news for them, so I enjoy telling and hearing all the stories again.

Mole rats, lost treasures and crowd.

1. A wildlife documentary involving naked mole rats. I like mole rats because they live in bee-like colonies, with a queen running the show. I think this shows an admirable determination to do their own thing.

2. A programme of BBC radio shows believed lost but then recovered. My favourites were The Green Machine -- a factory worker bonds with his vibrating sprocket press causing chaos on the factory floor; and The Great Fire of London -- a collection of eyewitness accounts of historical events.

3. Something Andy said to me on Saturday -- the more I think about it, the more I like it, which is why it counts for today. He pointed out that the 180 hits each day on Three Beautiful Things is about the same number of people as a primary school assembly. So... uh... play nicely, and please note that the loos by the adventure playground are out of bounds until the plumber removes the tennis ball from the soil pipe.