My interests have been so scattered and varied lately that any attempt to produce a document here that demonstrates coherence and unity would have been futile, but rather than disappear for an even greater length of time, I�ll resort to my usual maneuver�a list.

Here goes:

1. Since the last time I appeared here, we�ve attended another of Owen�s school musical performances, this time a band performance in the west campus auditorium. The progress these ninth-grade kids have made in two years amazes me. The clarinets no longer squeak and squawk and grate, and the brass has gained timbre and tremolo and brilliance. They were a pleasure to hear.

2. Josh drove home from Virginia on March 2 for his spring break. While here, he secured his summer job with Pathfinder Dave and firmed up his plans to share an apartment in town with James over the summer break. He also inquired into working on the campaign for the Kansas governor�s race.

   Spring break won�t begin here until March 16, and Josh departed for Virginia last Saturday, March 9. Most of his local friends at KSU were still involved in their classes, studies, jobs or lives, and still others hadn�t returned from their colleges in faraway and exotic places (Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska), so for many of the daytime hours, Josh appeared to languish at home, alone without a playmate.

3. A week ago, Taylor won a first-place ribbon in his school science fair. He conducted an experiment on his classmates to determine whether the music they listened to during a quiz�classical, country, rock or silence�affected their performance on the battery of arithmetic quizzes he�d compiled (the Mozart effect). He expected the classical to have the best influence, but in his small sample, country clearly yielded the best results.

   Although his sample size wasn�t large enough to warrant drawing any real conclusions, Taylor�s method and substantial documentation were excellent. I overheard one parent from the university say that his own thesis for his MS wasn�t as long, and Julian�s dad, a Ph.D. in entomology, congratulated me on Taylor�s work and presentation, and proclaimed it the best he�d seen in his kids� long tenure at the school. Ah, the reflected glory of our kidlings.

   Saturday (which could be "today" by the time I post this) Taylor runs again in the Aggieville St. Pat�s Day two-mile fun run, a feat he undertook for the first time last year. Thursday and Friday his school was out of session for parent-teacher conferences, so Thursday morning he decided to begin his training. We picked up hyphenated Benjamin and his younger brother hyphenated Jonathan for a run around City Park, a forty-acre tract a quarter-mile square. Unfortunately, kids from a P.E. class at the high school�s east campus were also running around the park�s perimeter at the time. Knowing many of those kids through Owen, Taylor spent more time visiting Owen�s buds (Safa, for one) than he spent running. Their time for the mile-long stroll was just under ten minutes.

   Then on Friday night, he and Ben ran two miles around the park easily, and afterward Taylor slyly remarked (when he was home, away from Ben) that Ben imagined they would run together during Saturday's race. I think that Ben is certainly as capable as Taylor is at completing the run swiftly, but he doesn�t seem to have the internal motivation that Taylor does.

4. Last Saturday, inspired by a science teacher whose general science course at the high school is known to students simply by his last name, Owen and Safa drafted me to drive them out into the countryside (unlit by streetlight or moon) to view the constellations. Owen, Safa, Taylor, and I started our adventure at the observation point near the dam at Tuttle Creek Reservoir, but the lights in the parking lot polluted the sky and drove us farther into the night's wilderness and up the reservoir to Tuttle Cove.

   In the darkness of the cove, the sky was dusty with stars, and constellations were free for the naming.

   One shooting star, too.

5. Me? I have many projects underway, but nothing (other than a haircut and the minor changes I've made to the log) nearing completion:

   1. I have new pages and pictures (Kansana and quotations from my reading) for this site, but nothing ready to share.

   2. I have a tale underway (one intended for kids) that is taking much time, but not enough time. (I know, I know, but that sentence really does make sense.)

   3. Steinbeck stuff. I haven�t read Cannery Row since college. I�m rereading it and appreciating it more now than I did then. When I was a freshman and sure of everything, Cannery was way too simple for me.

      I'm also tasting Sweet Thursday for the first time, a sequel of sorts to Cannery, and, of course, I remain dazzled and easily distracted by all the supplementary materials available so readily on the Web.

   4. After watching Kundun last weekend, I cut my hair to within three eighths of an inch of my scalp. Solidarity with the Dalai Lama, of course. (And that�s only a bit shorter than I was cutting it anyway.)

   5. I am ready to plant onions this weekend, undulant turkeys leave the woods and galumph through open fields, and for the next week our local city streets will be empty of students. And there are few things finer in this life than spring in a small college town without its students.

And that's enough for now.

Reading: Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday (both Steinbeck) and Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama

Watching: In the Name of the Father; A Voyage Round My Father; Shrek (now a staple); Kundun; and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.