The Red Sox equipment van left for Florida yesterday afternoon as scheduled. Although the idea of baseball's return is exciting, I've not started to think deeply about the team yet - the starting rotation, new players, returning players, and the competition. Spring training is as much for the fans as it is for the players. The season starts in 50 days.

I've spent a bit of time this morning trying a few tricks with Perl. We've had a problem with invalid hyperlinks in our PDF documents. There are plenty of link checkers for HTML files, but none that I've found for PDF. So, I've been thinking that it might be fun to cobble something together. Perl is a very powerful and even elegant language. The syntax, however, is quite fussy. It's just different enough from shell scripts, batch files, and other scripting languages that, well, that I get messages such as, and I'm not making this up, "Useless use of time...".

We have a full weekend ahead. We need to put the furniture back in our room-without-a-name. We'll see my father this afternoon and pick up whatever groceries he needs. The travelers return from PEI late this afternoon. We'll have the traditional Saturday night hot dogs and beans in their honor. Tomorrow is the birthday of Michael Francis (15). We'll have a party here. Threaded through all of this are the usual assignments - bringing in wood, grocery shopping, paying the bills, reading the newspapers, taking a nap.

Don has been gone for two years.

A couple of years before he died, Don came down with blood poisoning. He was hospitalized and in a coma for several days. We thought we were going to lose him then. During his coma, he had a steak and eggs breakfast with the Source. (The Source made him buy.) They had long talks about everything.

"Am I going to to die?" Don asked.

"Do you want to?" the Source asked. Don came back to be with us for a while and he brought us that story.