Light rain, overcast skies and too much time indoors -- that's the news. We might get a bright haze for a few hours, but soon the clouds return, sometimes to spray a little rain at us, but usually to blow eastward where they dump their waters on Topeka or Kansas City, leaving us just damp.

Geez. With a beginning like that, I must be ripe to buy a rain guage. Couldn't AARP just issue a rain guage with the membership invitation?

Anyway...Monday night the family (minus Josh) and the grandmas went to Owen's middle school for a ninty minute bleacher-butt awards ceremony. Owen collected awards for his grade point average (he's comfortably placed in the tier just below the 4.0's) and for fitness and athletics. He's happy, and we are too; meanwhile, Taylor lurks, calculating what he'll need to do to surpass Owen, preparing his acceptance speeches, and practicing his pie-faced, gollyshucks-I'm-sooo-undeserving look -- a facade to mask the nattynattybooboo attitude that lies within all of us.

The program started at 7 PM. When it ended after 8:30, we drifted out of the gym to find that the night, though cloudy and moonless, was still bright, a reminder that in just a month, the kids will be able to play outdoors in twilight until after nine o'clock.

Tuesday night when I drove home from work with the windows down, the smells of spring hit -- freshly mown grass along the roadside, the damp asphalt of the highway, a hint of creosote from the new railroad ties, and that smell that comes before or after a spring or summer storm, a smell that I have identified since childhood (rightly or wrongly) as ozone, the invigorating tickle that is more of a feeling than an aroma. I don't know that it's ozone. No one ever opened a Mason jar under my nose, ordered me to inhale and told me "this is ozone," but I've come to think of it as ozone. Whatever it is, it's another of spring's delights.

Tonight after work, under blue skies and with temperatures in the mid-seventies, Taylor and I dribbled a basketball down to the school yard for some one-on-one. He didn't want just a shootaround or a game of horse; the gutsy little dweeb wanted a game with me.

Because I have about two feet on him, he insisted that I not shoot from within the lane, and that I not block his shot with hands above my head. He had some other rules that were far too technical for simple me, but they seemed to have something to do with not embarassing him in front of the other kids in the yard by kissing or hugging him after made shots. In return, I insisted that I should still get three points for baskets made from directly behind the backboard (a standard schoolyard rule, no?) and that he be responsible for chasing down all errant balls (a standard old fart's rule). He let me win 24 to10.

Shoulda let me hug ya, Dude.