Pawprints From Space

Concluding the week with good friends, great wine and wonderful jazz is always good. The Wine & Jazz Fridays at the City Club are great. Most of the time the dinners following are even better when the conversation gets silly, raunchy at times and even political... but always enjoyable. It was a long month this week for no apparent reason. It just was. Not much to be done about that but there you are and it is finally done so moving on. Like basketball (only sport I ever did well at in gym) but not really following the NCAA tournament. Shame that OSU lost tonight nonetheless. Hopeful that Lima Central Catholic will win at the state championship tomorrow. Was invited to attend but already over booked and somehow need to make the desert for the dinner with friends tomorrow night. These chocolate/vanilla cream cheese pie things with raspberry sauce do not make themselves you know. Do enjoy the company of a certain gentleman even if he did go home first (early?) tonight but then...

Fifteen (15) years ago on March 11, 1995 I was in Fort Worth Texas feeling very agitated and not knowing why. I needed to go home, I needed to go home right away I just knew it. But my flight wasn't until the following morning. I kept calling home and got no answer, over and over. Finally in the evening I called my in-laws thinking he might have gone there for dinner, they hadn't seem him all day nor heard from him either. The news came several hours later from his little sister (she was gone too a short time afterwards) when she called to tell me he was gone and that his dad had gone to find him and did find him in the bathroom. He had fallen in the tub and drowned. Ironic because one of the few fights we had (repeatedly) was over the need to use a bath mat in the tub so a person would not slip and fall. I was for it, he thought it unnecessary. You see, martial artists don't need bath mats. Especially those in their mid-thirties and in great shape. Clearly he was wrong...

There are eighteen (18) days until the First Day of Spring on March 20th. I saw a robin over the weekend in my crabapple tree (Rumba saw it first and went nuts, so I had to check it out). The piles of snow are growing shorter and there is a circle devoid of snow around the base of the oak tree. The grass isn't exactly "green" but it isn't totally brown either. Squirrels are frolicking about and stealing food from the bird feeders again. The seed catalogs have been arriving in the mail almost non-stop which makes me dream of seedlings and sunshine. How to start seeds in a house with a high-energy kitten? There are gardens sleeping under the snow. Garden plots that need to be cleaned and re-arranged - plants needs thinning out, some need to be removed altogether and moved to areas where they might do better, the veggie bed needs to be raised another level (it wasn't deep enough last year the roots didn't developed as they should have)... so much to do. So ...