My days at Tripod dwindle. The 'premium' subscription will run out sometime in June and the pop-ups or a banner will appear. I will move the site elsewhere, probably to Geocities, so that I can upload from anywhere and still avoid the advertising. Not many of the computers at school have FTP software loaded and the administration has grown flakey and cantankerous about authorizing downloads, so I had to rule out some of the other sites that I might have preferred.

Why did I say "probably to Geocities"? It's decided. Friday night I uploaded text and image files into new directories at Geocities, and then I started to make the changes to the html that allow the links to wend their way to the new directories. If I'm lucky and if my foresight is working at all, the links won't have to be changed in the event of a future move. And after editing three months worth of links, I'm grateful that my production was so light.

I'll continue to post entries at Tripod until the Geo pages are better organized than they are now, and better organized than the pages at Tripod have ever been. I will probably keep a set of the pages at Tripod just in case a server out in never-never land goes down, but the Geocities address will be the working site. When the new site is up and running, I'll provide a link to it from the index page at Tripod so that the multitudes who read here might find me. Or we could all carpool in the Metro.

On to matters of greater moment. This weekend marks the psychic (if not the solar) start of summer here -- gas prices climb back to nearly $1.60 per gallon and the city pools open Monday. (They really opened today but we didn't tell the boys.) Because we don't have a pool, the boys make do by running a sprinkler so the spray falls on the trampoline, and they take their dives on the slippery tramp. Thunderstorms passed through last night, so temperatures today didn't get much above 75 F, but O and T would not be stayed from their water play, a rite of summer. Taylor did keep a sodden T-shirt on to keep warm, he claims, in the sprinkler. Uh huh.

On the peony front, the ladies of the family are painting coffee cans green and preparing peonies for their places on the graves of the family dead. Laden with peonies, they will begin their journey at 7:30 AM Sunday to cemeteries in Council Grove (less than an hour down the road), Eureka, and finally Piedmont (both several hours away, east of Wichita), before returning home tomorrow night. I will remain here again this year to observe a private vigil (okay, I'm sleeping in), and perhaps to attend a potluck at the fellowship.

The Memorial Day weekend seems an appropriate time to bid farewell to the blue goose. We bought this truck (a '58 Chevy) for Josh when he started driving, but after he put it in harm's way this winter by turning left in front of oncoming traffic, we learned that the cost of repairs exceeded our affection for it, so we put it up for sale. Yesterday, the local Knights of Columbus bought it for a nominal sum. They will repair it, complete the restoration and raffle it to raise the seed money for a Habitat for Humanity home. Hey, for a few dollars, the blue goose might be mine again.

I have missed the bone-shaking, shoulder-straining, rump-springing comfort of the blue goose. Bouncing down a dusty road at a farmer's speed with the canoe loaded in the bed, an elbow perched on the window ledge in the late afternoon sun, the fly windows pressed all the way forward directing the breeze into the cab, a swirl of dead flies blowing from the metal dashboard, a little daylight shining beneath the accelerator pedal, two kids bouncing on the seat beside you who want to fish and throw rocks in Deep Creek, ball caps for everyone, the sense that you're headed for a Saturday twilight that need never end if you spend it adrift on slow-moving water -- what's better'n that?