The sun came out just now, for almost 30 seconds! I was suffering from sunlight-dependency-withdrawl-symptoms, that little hit took some of the edge off. Good stuff, man.

Now if it would just come out again long enough for me to get some sun on this afternoon's ride...

I was heading out to run a couple of errands this afternoon, when a neighbor from up the hill asked if I'd come up to look at her yard for a minute. I'd never met this lady or her husband before, but they were typical for this neighborhood: very old, married to each other for at least 200 years, and lived in this neighborhood since the mid-sixties.

Yes, Corinne and I are the "kids" around here.

Anyway, this lady paid me one of the highest compliments that I can imagine coming from a stranger, realistically. She asked me if I'd help landscape part of their yard, what they could do to make their lawn look nice ("like yours," she said), and what they needed to do to help the grass grow in the strip they'd just seeded.

Wow. She actually thought I was a pro, or knew what I was doing! When I look at my front yard I see a few nice spots surrounded by a lot of flaws, but they apparently saw only the nice spots.

I explained that I don't do this for a living, and what I know about it I've learned by trial and error, reading a couple of books, more trial and error, and talking to anybody who knows more about this stuff than I do.

Neither of them were inclined to take no for an answer, and I agreed to do the planting if they'd do the purchasing. I told them I'd do it for free, but they still weren't listening. "I wouldn't dream of letting him do it for free," she said to her husband, as if I wasn't standing right there.

I must admit that myt resistance was only half-hearted. If I woke up one morning and found that Macrobyte and Conversant were just a pleasant dream, that they never really happened, I'd want to go to work in a beat up pick up truck wearing dirty gloves and spend all day with my hands tending to the plants and coaxing new growth out of the soil. (Oh, and killing vines!)

Whoa, snap out of it Seth. The suns out, and it's time to ride.