Odds and Ends

It rained again last night and it's still misting this morning, so Dickie and I skipped our usual morning walk. We expect to spend the evening at Gretchen's where we'll watch the "Oscars".

We haven't seen "Aviator", which I understand has a good chance to win "best picture". We did see "Million Dollar Baby" which would get my vote, if I were voting. Hillary Swank was great in that one. So were Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, for that matter.

This is changing the subject, but I caught my neighbor's cat taking, what else?, a cat nap the other morning. Doesn't he look comfortable?

So, what else can I tell you today? We're coming to the end of the month now. Should be warmer soon. Have a good day!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY !

Spring is in the air here in Sonoma County. Some of the shrubs and trees are beginning to blossom. We have daffodils blooming all over the place and my rose bushes are leafing out like winter is over. There's still a chill in the air at times, but warmer days are definitely around the corner.

Dickie and her friend, Nadine, attended a Santa Rosa Symphony concert this afternoon while I stayed home and watched the end of the golf tournament at Pebble Beach, which Phil Mickelson won handily.

For the rest of the time today I continued reading Ben Franklin's writings. I think the volume I'm reading contains most everything he published, which was quite a lot. Presently, I'm going through articles he wrote for London newspapers in the years preceding the Revolutionary War. Ben was a loyal Englishman, almost to the last. He was certain in earlier years that, if his countrymen (the colonists) were treated justly, they would never rebel. In that he may have been too idealistic, but his writings suggest that he was realist enough to see that war was becoming inevitable by about 1773. It's fun to see how his own attitude gradually changes. What an interesting time that was!

Mustard Time

Driving through the countryside here in Northern California at this point in time, you see vineyards filled with blooming mustard plants. It's a brilliant sight. Dickie and I drove past some fields this morning as we went to buy produce at a nearby market. Here's a picture I took last Sunday afternoon:



It was warm this morning. Something over 60° when we went for our morning walk. Everybody we met was talking about it. It was about 30 degrees warmer today than yesterday according to one of our neighbors. We stopped by the library on the way home from the market so Dickie could pick up a book and there were people sunning themselves out on the Village Green. Spring is definitely on the way, although there's little doubt we'll be having some more cooler weather before spring really gets here.



WEB PAGE HASSLE

I had a difficult time of it with the distribution of my web page today. Apparently, the McAfee protection controls on my email were somehow marking it as "spam", maybe even "infected", as it left my computer, so most people who got the URL couldn't open it from the e-mail message, as they usually can. Hopefully, I can teach all my web page recipients to copy the URL from the e-mail message to the address line of their browser when they run into that problem. That's the best way to handle it. I tried re-sending several times, but even that didn't always work. I guess that's life!