Checking In

It's Saturday and the really nice weather continues. It's been a unique March, warm and sunny most of the time. This, I guess, is the upside of global warming. I'm not complaining, just noting. The trees outside the front door are budding furiously, like they know that it's going to freeze again and they want to get some leaves out there before it freezes back into winter. The tree in the center is an ash tree, one of those ash trees that are likely to succumb to the Emerald Ash beetle. The city has started to cut down even healthy ash trees in anticipation of the coming plague. I plan to enjoy the ashes until they pass from this street like the elms did back in the 1970's.

The grass is greener than any March that I can remember. The back yard is ready for some maintenance, maybe some raking and then a tomato plant or two. It seems too early to get too excited about lawn mowing.

I played some tennis this morning at Wooddale. I think we could have gone outside for the session, but we have permanent time inside, and what the heck, there's no wind in there - the FunZone, they call it. We had two competitive sets, topped by a 7-6 set decided by a seven-point tiebreaker just before our time ran out.