The Three Levels of Vegetable Gardening 1. Getting amusement out of it. 2. Getting food out that’s worth more than you spent on it. 3. Getting out more calories than you put into it.

I peaked at level 2. 🌱 #gardening

Sara Brown just spoke about #Tolkien as a war poet. His poems look internally, where the most famous WWI poets looked outward, bitterly and angrily, toward the people who weren’t on the front. Faërie is the means by which he jumped past those early Kübler-Ross stages. #Mythmoot

Symphony #93, third movement, by #Haydn is on the car stereo. Lyrics suggest themselves this #caturday: Miss Fléau the cat, She loudly complains That she’s in a crate And her dinner’s late And she doesn’t want to take a road trip…

“Ce n’est plus le temps de plaisanter ; les bons mots ne conviennent point aux massacres.” -Voltaire, 18 juillet 1766

Small-town politics can be a trip. I just got an alert urging me to “vote Pennefeather for Fork Supervisor“. #virginia

Some days I love the Internet. Just now I looked for the text of “The Gay Science” by Friedrich Nietzsche. DuckDuckGo served me up a PDF of it printed entirely in Comic Sans.

In the mail today: the Cremation Society of Virginia invites me to an informational meeting at… Texas Jack’s Barbecue. 😮

Today I Learned that in Uzbek, Webster’s Dictionary is called “Vebsteringliztilininguchinchiyangixalqarolug’ati”. #English

My wife’s phone hasn’t been ringing off the hook, because phones don’t have hooks any more. What’s the modern equivalent of that expression?

At every #graduation ceremony, a speaker has to say “be the change you wish to see in the world.” That’s kind of alarming to someone who’s working to increase their soil organic matter. 🌱 #gardening

Last week I cut the weeds in my garden into neat rows with a hoe. If you don’t look closely enough to see it’s all lambsquarters, it looks like I have a thriving crop growing. 🌱 #gardening

Transplanted the tomatoes today and put cages around them. In May, the purpose of a tomato cage is to keep me from stepping on the seedlings. 🌱 #gardening

Ran into a friend from college whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years. At one point in the conversation I set up a two-line joke and she beat me to the punchline, just like the old days.

Usually when I go to the hardware store, I occupy two people for 10 minutes to find a part that costs 29 cents. It was almost a pleasure to immediately buy a thing that costs $40 today.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 30 definitions for “man” but only 12 for “woman”. Let’s step up our game! #words

The furthest-from-mainstream church around here put on their sign for Easter, “The cradle and tomb are empty; the throne is full.” I’m no theologian, but “the throne is full” has a different meaning from what they probably meant to say. #WondersAndSigns

I just typed “Plan” and the iPad’s predictive text offered up “B” as the first choice and “A” as the second. It knows me pretty well by now.

Financial reporters call a 10% drop in a stock index a “correction”. Shouldn’t they also call a 10% rise a “mistake”? #stocks

J.R.R. #Tolkien was not above a pun, but I can’t tell if this one was intentional or not. Chapter 13 of the Silmarillion “On the Flight of the Noldor” says, “…there followed after long years of peace, while their swords fenced Beleriand…” What do you think?

A woodchuck was out in the corn stubble today, looking remarkably portly for March. Winter must not have been very hard. #willdlife

Started reading “Careless People”, aka the book Facebook doesn’t want you to read. So far, there’s been an earthquake, a shark attack, and an escape in evening dress from a ruined mesoamerican palace. And I’m only up to chapter 3! This is how to write a memoir. 📚