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"Hello, this is Marko the Werelynx posting a diary as I head out the door to the airport. Please leave a comment after the beep."
[Beep!]
Actually, as I sit down to write it's the Tuesday evening before my mid-day Wednesday flight. I'll pack in the morning, and I'm thinking that I probably won't have much of any time or inclination to be a social critter online on Friday. Friday is my usual day to post an open thread diary to the Street Prophets group.
I'll be flying to a city that I've visited before, a couple decades ago. I'll be traveling with family to stay with a stranger and I'll be seeing old friends. I am a bit nervous about the trip. I'm getting to be a comfortable, old, worn slipper of a man who would much rather be relaxing, recuperating from one of the activities that make me feel old and worn.

I'm still feeling a bit bedraggled after #2 Son and I split and stacked some logs to dry in the barn. I'd love to be able to boast about how many cords of wood we stacked. Nothing oozes Lumberjack testosterone like the mere sound of the mysterious term "cord of wood".
Hmm? Oh, a "cord of wood" is actually 128 square feet. I remember my dad telling me something like that the gaps in a cord should be big enough for a rat to run through, but not the cat that's chasing him... or maybe it was a squirrel being chased. Much of the same really. One of the odd bits of trivia rattling around in my brain is that rats and squirrels both have the same gestation period-- 28 days. February... um, the brain is scratchy vinyl tonight. Skipping grooves.
I suppose that pile of wood is nearly 2 cords. It's over 5 feet high, 4-ish feet wide and I'm just confusing myself trying to work out how long it is... about 12 feet I'm hoping. At any rate, none of it counts because after it dries for a year or three I'll still have to cut the smaller stuff down to stove-sized lengths on my death-defying circular table saw

... although most of it will get the Leatherface treatment and then still require further splitting. So, it's not like we really did anything last Saturday I guess. There's an old saying that wood heats you three times: when you cut down the tree, when you cut and split the logs and finally when you burn it. I think that could be expanded somewhat. For one thing, few people grow trees inside their stoves...
Just now I've caught myself in the act of trying to give this diary an unbearable title. "Discord"-- there, you see what my brain is dredging up tonight.
Perhaps I should just leave you with a lizard.

Just a miraculously beautiful creature-- perfect, tiny scales shining in the sun like jewels, patiently allowing me to poke my camera through the grass at it and take a dozen blurry photos before I gave up on my manual settings and let the camera do its own thing-- until the lizard had had enough basking to warm it and enough of bumbling photographers so it slipped away, under the fallen leaves and apples.
