On our way to my father's house yesterday afternoon, we saw sap buckets hanging on the sides of the sugar maples. It was a good day for collecting sap. The temperature had been below freezing overnight and then up into the low 40s during the day. Some of the larger farms, particularly in Vermont, have elaborate systems of tubing that bring the sap down the hills to the sap house. This was a small operation, a few buckets on a few trees.

My father is doing pretty well. He's without pain most of the time, but complains that his back is not very strong. Nevertheless, when we arrived, he was backing the Jeep into the garage in preparation for the snow storms that may come this week.

Sandra had a question about knots. My father has a World War II-era book about basic seamanship that includes some pages of illustrations about knots. The book provided the information they needed. My father has other, even older reference books, on metallurgy and welding, notably, books that he picked up in trade school and in his early years as a welder. Both Sandra and I write technical reference material. Our documents, though, are ephemeral. The goal in our business is to replace the old with the new as quickly as possible, to put very little into print because anything that's in print is regarded as out of date. On the other end of the scale, my father finds technical answers in books that are 60 and 70 years old.

My automated search for a technical writing job brought me a listing for an Animal Facility Manage - "this position oversees the husbandry, health and well-being of laboratory animals. "

Today we'll attend a going-away party for our niece, Lori. She is moving to Los Angeles later this month. Lori is the daughter of Sandra's brother, John.

OK, so I start a web search for the lyrics to Happy Trails, figuring that would be a nice sendoff for Lori. I found it here (Caution, all of the links in this paragraph play music.) I found it on the Kids' Pages at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences web site, part of the National Institutes of Health. I started looking around the site and found lyrics for a bunch of other songs, such as Louie, Louie, YMCA, and that perennial kids' favorite, The Ballad of the Green Beret. Overall, it is a great resource for lyrics of songs that are ingrained in the popular culture. Without Google, however, I never would have found it. A site on environmental health sciences just isn't a place I'd look for song lyrics. "The Sing-Along pages are included," says the authorization page, "because sing-along activities are particularly useful for motivating young children to learn to read and to improve their reading skills."