"They didn't want it good; they wanted it Wednesday." - Robert A. Heinlein

Local headline: "Oregon lacks personnel to deal with voluminous reportage for legal pot operations."
That may be technically correct grammar but there has to be a better way to word it.
Reportage sounds like it should be a French sport.

This is our third spring on Baker Rd. and the differences from the previous two are interesting. The Dogwood trees are blooming especially profusely this year and we love the sprinkle of white just outside our kitchen window (two trees) and the five or six across the creek.
We have tons of tiny black spiders on the ground outside. They're about the size of your thumbnail and very fast.
The butterflies are just about gone after a month of gracing us with their presence. The size of a quarter and a pale blue/purple they were also everywhere. Hundreds of them. They fluttered about 3' off the ground, just high enough to entice the cats who never did seem to catch any.

We're in that transition when I typically light a fire to take the chill off in the morning but don't stoke it past about 9 a.m. and don't need to light one in the evening. During January and much of February we kept it going all day long. Soon I won't have to light one in the morning, and at that point I can begin tearing out this stove to get ready for the new one we'll have installed before the next heating season. We've saved up the money to pay for it and I'm eager to have the modern efficiency and convenience of a wood stove that's not 40+ years old.

I'll remove the stove (at about 300 lbs.), the hideous fake brick heat shield on the wall behind it, and the equally ugly and cracked fake stone base it sits on. The new stove (a Lopi 1250 like this one) doesn't require any wall shield and can sit 6" from the wall thanks to modern engineering and metallurgy, giving us more space in our tiny living room. The only base required is a non-combustable "spark shield," not the 3" thick heat shield this stove requires. I'm going to get slate tiles and lay them on the floor and fashion a wood border that I'll nail down to hold the tiles in place.

As an added benefit this Lopi has a cooktop surface we can use when the power goes out.

It occurred to me this morning that I graduated (from) H.S. in 1968, that 50 years later I will turn 68, and the year is 2018. Is that a pattern that repeats itself no matter what year you graduated or is it some weird coincidence of numbers? Since I suck at math I'll let you work it out.
I don't care enough to struggle with it.

Facebook showed me this pic today from my timeline four years ago. When I say every nut and bolt of that truck came apart I'm not kidding. This is the turn-around point, the stage at which things start going back together.

You can see the driveshaft hanging there in the middle of the frame but that eventually came out, too. I had to have a custom driveshaft made to accommodate the 5-speed transmission I installed.
I sure enjoyed doing that project. If I had a real garage now I'd be doing the same thing to Sally. Alas, I only have a big "shed" with a dirt floor.
So maybe God is protecting me from myself.

We typically listen to the NPR radio show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on Saturdays. This morning one of the guest contestants was H. Jon Benjamin. I'm not cool enough to know who he is so I looked him up and learned that he's a comedian who does the voices of several adult cartoon characters. (By adult I mean for shows that are aimed at adults.) He talked about a time when he hired some jazz musicians to join him in a studio to record an album...despite the fact that he doesn't know how to play the piano at all. The jazz musicians would play together and then nod to him, cuing him to play random notes on the piano.
They played a little bit from one of the cuts on the album including his piano playing.
It sounded Just. Like. Jazz.
I rest my case.

My workout at the gym this afternoon included kettle bell swings and burpees. A total of 63 burpees.
Overheard from the far corner of the gym while I'm doing them...
Guy #1: "We used to do those in football as punishment. They're called burpees."
Guy #2: "They look like punishment."
Yep. Pretty much.