Finally! Friday!

I'm not sure why it feels so good, but Friday is here and things are fine. That Spouse o' Mine is home from a trip, two out of three kids have touched base tonight, and the remainder is out in the mountains - a good place to be, I think, on Memorial Day weekend.

College Boy Graham is looking at the light at the end of this quarter's tunnel, after which he is doing the Jack Kerouac thing down the West Coast: from ~ 50 miles from the Canadian border, camping along the way, to ~ 20 miles from the Mexican border. I hope he writes it down.

Grad Student Gillian is living in a San Diego hostel this week (and is quite happy there), until she moves into her summer digs next week. She is doing an internship at the Maritime Museum at San Diego. I think the climate will suit her fine. City living? Fine as well. Beach vicinity? She might possibly thrive. This three-day weekend, she is thinking about driving up to LA to see her Tibetan monks - students from her ESL class this spring. What better way to see LA, I say, than with Tibetan monks?

This morning, 5:00 am, I made a thermos of coffee, grabbed a cup and headed out to the pasture with two dogs. They gamboled about in the pre-dawn mist while I sat on a log and meditated. That is, I meditated until the Bloodhound caught a scent which took him into the wheat field next door. I immediately ran across the pasture (coffee cup in hand,) and begged him to come back. He didn't listen o my calls, so I had to run vertically across the pasture again (I had thrown down the coffee cup at this point), and call him from the road. He came bounding at a pace which makes me a believer that this breed was once used to take down wild boar. This pup is FAST. We headed back to the house and then back into the pasture for another half hour. It IS a nice way to start the day. Sans running with coffee cup.

Cherry season is now in southern California, and the orchard growers are in daily contact with us. The orchard growers and packers are about the nicest, most polite people I have ever worked with. I think they are happy people because they don't live in Tornado Alley. OK, OK, the earthquake bugaboos... but acres and acres of cherry blossoms every spring? Ah...