Cogito, ergo sum. Cogito.

There are a couple of oak trees in the back yard that don't look healthy. They have a mold on the trunk that may be the culprit. Unlike the sudden oak death that's been killing oaks around the country, in which case the tree is dead within weeks, this ailment has been progressing for a year or more. These aren't very old trees, perhaps 40-50 years. We'll see what kind of summer they have and make our decision accordingly.

After a long and agitated wait, we have five requisitions to hire people, two in the office where I work and three in New York. In addition, I'll be able to bring one or two people for six-month contracts. We have a couple of good candides already and a couple more will be coming in to talk with us next week. Even with those new hires, we'll have quite a challenge to meet the deadlines schedule for late June and early July. During a conference call yesterday afternoon, a co-worker asked if this was a time to panic. I said that a bit of panic might not be out of line. At which she panicked, "If you say it's time to panic..."

Just Marley and me for the evening. Sandra's gone into Boston to visit a friend she's known since second-grade. The families moved to different towns and Sandra's friend has been in California since college, I believe. She has two children, the youngest is attending BU as an art major. Sandra's friend and her daughter will fly back to California tomorrow.

There's a threat of frost tonight and again tomorrow, although it's not likely that we'll get any her or at the camp. This is kind of frost that settles into the valleys. This is something that I have trouble understands. If you go up to the top of a hill, you'll be cooler. Here's a table that shows the effect. I'll track down an explantion later.

One of the maxims in parenting is that if a kid wants to mow the lawn, the kid is probably too young. The grandson of our next door neighbors is somewhere between eight and 10. I don't know if he volunteered or not, but he did a good job.
Fifteen years ago or so, I heard a loud explosion next door. I ran out of the house, expecting to see that the furnace had exploded. The lawn-mowing kid's father was standing on their door step. "It was nothin," he said. "Just an M80."

Not only is this in Deleware getting fired, they're throwing books of lawsuits at him as he runs out the door. Hel also spent an "spent an inordinate amount of time engaged in personal iPod-related activities."

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has been on the Billboard chart for 1500 weeks, a record. About half of those weeks were consecutive, starting in 1973. (The article has the wrong album cover. It should be this.)

There was a nice Spiritul Life column in today's Boston Globe about philosophical healing. My mother was quite taken by the idea of philosophical counseling when she first encountered it.