Tuesday - 354th

This is when you start to bargain with the weather gods. You want each day to be even better, warmer, sunnier.  ("If you just keep those temps up there, I promise I'll try not to complain about rain, or the occasional nightly dips below freezing, or the heat waves that are sure to come this summer...") And this is just so like us mortals! Never satisfied. Two weeks ago, this string of warm-ish sunny days would have felt like a tropical interlude. Today, we just want to ignore the fact that it's early March. We want the great weather to continue, unabated. We want the moon.

Well, today we sort of get that moon. It's sunny, lovely and warm-ish (high of 37f, or 3c).

Good morning, baby chicks! Ready for your daily constitutional?

There's work to be done though, so we can't just let loose and indulge feelings of spring fever. We need to prep the old Mazda for a Craigslist sale. I didn't do a trade-in because in the end, my sanity clicked in and I understood that their "generous" $750 for it was not generous at all and that I could do way better, like two or three times better if I sold it on Craigslist. So Ed and I buffed it up, rust spots and all.

(Getting breakfast ready...)

Sometime in those hours of chores and chick care, I pick up one of the Subaru manuals that came with my new car. (Subaru is in fact named for a cluster of blue stars in the Taurus constellation. I hadn't realized that. You can read about it here.) You know how various electronics -- cameras, computers, etc -- come with quick info pamphlets that get you started right away without having to study the voluminous operational details in full user manuals? Well, Blue Moon has just such a "quick" start guide. It's 116 pages long.

It brought to mind an article from today's NYT on how we are overburdened with too much choice, too much complexity. too little standardization. Spending time learning all this stuff will help me make use of the car's incredible features. (I can only imagine how many additional features a high end car would have!) But it will take me away from doing other things. I have, for example, only five more pages to edit in my book project. That's sort of amazing: I got through the entire manuscript, in the months that I was forced to be away from my grandkids. But for the last five pages. So do I learn about the car, or do I finish the writing project? And if I make my way through the 116 page shortened manual, should I abandon the longer version altogether? At what point do you stop reading all the literature, all the small print, all the reviews that are thrust upon you as you buy, or update ever the next item?

In the late afternoon, after getting only to page 21 (and ineffectively at that, since you really should study these things while you're in the car staring at the dashboard), I put it down and Ed and I take our walk through the park that had given us so many skiing days this winter! No skiing today, just a nice, sunny March late day walk.

(Lake Waubesa, where the river runs to it. The fisher people and their huts are on the retreat...)

(Evening at the farmette... With the animals.)