I admit to being tired and grumpy this week, after a month-long book tour. I always get tired after book tours, (today caps the official Book Tour, 2 p.m. Barnes & Noble, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.) and I always forget that I get tired, and just think I’m wearing out. I’m getting a cold, and got some tick bites that are uncomfortable. Ticks are all over the dogs this week, and us.

Maria took charge and persuaded me – strongly – to spend the morning in bed, where I dozed a bit and read. She brought me tea and soup and yelled at me when I moved around.  Lenore stayed with me.  Maria is sweet but Sicilian, and when she gets worked up, I obey. I got permission to get  up to have lunch with my friend the writer Jenna Woiginrich, who publishes one of the world’s great blogs from nearby Cold Antler Farm. It was her turn to pay and we went to the Burger Den in Salem, where they have at least 400 things on the menu, all but a handful frozen. I am a cheap date, as she conceded.

Jenna, who is barely out of diapers,  and I have an odd history. She e-mailed me a few years back, seeking advice from a fellow shepherd, and she did not know that I was in the midst of cracking up, and was besieged by stalkers after HBO decided to make a movie out of “A Dog Year.” I told her I wasn’t into mentoring and I didn’t say so, but clearly hoped she would get lost. At the time, I was modeling Bedlam Farm  from Attica.

Last year, it was me who e-mailed her, as  I was blown away by the writing I saw in her blog and one of the  books – “Chick Days,” “Made From Scratch” – that  she has already published about her life as a homesteader, farmer, Dystopian-Utopian, Animal and Border Collie Loving, Workshop-Sponsoring, Chicken-Slaughtering, Homesteading Eco- Survivalist. She forgave my earlier brush-off, although she did not forget it, and brought her sweet border collie Gibson over to work sheep with Rose this summer. Jenna and I became good friends right away. After all, how many crazy and willful blogger/writers with farms and animals live around here? Or anywhere? We share the same appreciation of corporatism, and devote much of our lives to avoiding it, and also a love of individualism. Not to mention writing books.

Jenna is very impressive. She is young, brave, bursting with ideas, workshops, ideas, and determination to keep her farm. She writes beautifully and vividly,  works hard, managed to get a farm mortgage, sells ads, barters for woodstoves and greenhouses, grows much of her own food.  She is living a self-determined life when so many people live to pay their bills and be safe, and she has a book coming out soon – Barnheart – about her passion to get a farm and live there. It’s interesting, because I always saw myself as a writer who had a farm, and she insisted she was a farmer, but not a writer.  Oh, well, I was right. I appreciate having her as a friend.

Jenna got herself a hot NYC literary agent recently and you will be hearing a lot of noise from her in the next few years, trust me.

Maria says she means for me to take it easy the next couple of days, and agree. I’m reading Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cat’s Tale” and a new biography of John Brown. Plus Vol. 4 of the Zohar, (the Kabbalah). I’m also going to try and see the new Clint Eastwood movie “J. Edgar.” I’ll file a report on that. Happy to report that my Iphone, Ipad2, Macs are humming along.