(yawn)

As a married man, you can be happy or you can be right. Take your pick. I'd go with happy because in this case I think your wife was right.

Been with Amazon since 2002 and still amazed with the 1 and 2 day delivery. Remember when you used to order something and had to wait 4-6 weeks for delivery?

But I was really impressed a month ago when I ordered a cordless leaf blower from Home Depot one Saturday morning and had the tool in my hand 4 hours later. Maybe getting a little ridiculous.

Carpenter bee! Thanks for putting a name on it. Little bastards are boring holes in my cedar gazebo and my back porch. Never heard of a carpenter bee before. Perfectly round, perfectly sized 3/8" diameter hole. Easy to plug with a piece of dowel rod but they keep coming.

I bought my first camera BECAUSE it was all manual - Canon F1. The tide was just starting to turn to cameras that were electronic this and automatic that. I wanted to learn photography from the ground up. Still have the F1 sitting forlornly in my closet.

Reminds me of a book title I once saw: "Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the Water"

I think you just defined "photography". Nice job.

Outstanding. Every one.

You're welcome. After 50 (or so) years I still enjoy it.

Ha! I shouldn't do this in the middle of the night. Good catch.

For me as a teenager in the '60's music largely meant the Beatles, Stones, and the other icons of the day. I didn't have the least bit of interest in classical music until one rainy evening when I was home alone and started looking through my mother's LP collection. I was in some kind of mood and started going through a stack of classical records from some record club and it was...uh huh...okay...that one's all right...uh uh...you can have that one...maybe. Then I got to Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Festival Overture and it clicked. It was the first piece of classical music that I fell in love with and remains an icon of spring for me.

If you've never heard it, or even if you have, I recommend the version by the London Sympathy Orchestra led by Antal Dorati. A lot of other versions around, some really poor interpretations, but none that I have found that bring out the drama of the music like this one.

I have it on a playlist on my Amazon Prime account. If you don't have a Prime account or even if you do you can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbTLtNpTC5o

Sit back, put on the headphones, turn up the volume, and enjoy a turbulent journey from winter into spring.

Treebeard

I stopped transporting the squirrels raiding my bird feeder a couple years ago at about 175 trips. I would live trap them and make the 10 mile round trip to an oak forest on state land that was next to a corn field: squirrel utopia. The miles and time were adding up and I wasn't really making any headway; they just keep coming. Down to just scaring them off now, when we see them. They lost their cuteness long ago unless we see them in the park.

Hang in there, Steve. Gretch is gonna fix the "damn roads".

Sent a copy to my sister who is more Catholic than the Pope. She'll get a chuckle out of it.