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I'm baking bread today. There were a few weeks where I got out of the habit of baking, and I forgot how exemplary and satisfying it is. I really can't think of anything more so. I would drop everything and start a bakery this moment if it didn't mean I would have to wake up early every morning. Isn't it a wonder that flour can be so magical? There is deep sensory pleasure in its texture and habits of floating and slipping and collecting and puffing quite apart from the glory which appears out of the oven. Bread is the most divine medium for eating butter. Most things in life can be valued by their relationship to helping you eat butter.

Every so often, somewhere evenly in the middle between weekly and blue moons, I feel like my mind wakes up. Not that it is asleep the rest of the time, but at these moments it is much more awake. Too awake, too energized, too like a puppy tearing around and tripping you with the reef knot it just tied around your legs with the leash. I am delighted to have such energetic thoughts, but the rest of me panics, grieving for my inability to organize each thought as it arises, name it, catalog it, and rest easy with every seed of brilliance residing in a filing cabinet. Instead they are poured pell-mell through my head, dancing around together and running in and out of about a dozen doors. I run frazzled, trying to shut the doors, but they are opened faster than I can shut them and I don't really get to sit down with my guests and enjoy the party. This hasn't happened to me for a while, but I took enough notes last time during my observation of the phenomenon to contemplate it and present it to you in a pretty analogy bedecked with colored balloons.

Thad has a head cold of monumental proportions and has no snarky remarks with which he wishes to endow you.

It will be still several decades before the temperate weather is here and we will be safe in planting a garden, but the herbs growing on the window sill have begun a race to see who can be the healthiest and biggest, since a few warm days have come and we've opened all the windows as wide as we can. It hasn't really been warm enough to warrant such actions, but we have gotten to the place in early spring where we really, really do not care.