A friend called me yesterday to see if I was OK, since she noticed that I wasn’t blogging. Then Betsy Devine pinged me and that sent me over to Frank Paynter’s evocative Spring post, which made me really yearn for those kinds of connections again. Not just to nature or Nature, but to those feelings of honoring small, everyday details of a life lived with joy.
The real truth is that I have nothing to write about. And forget any joy. My days are filled with helping my mom find the half-dozen things that she misplaces each day and insists that someone came in and stole — with giving myself a headache shouting so that she can actually hear me and repeatintg everything I say at least three times before she actually understands.
So we took a ride today, she and I, to where we will be moving in a few months. These are my views of the area near where we will be living, where the Catskill cliffs rise awesomely in all seasons and against all colors of sky.

The sky today was a definite early Spring blue even though the trees in those mountains have barely begun to bud. By the time we move, they will be lush and green and I will bring in bags of topsoil for an herb garden in spite of the shale and scrub.
Meanwhile, I share here a chuckle I got the last time I checked Ken Camp’s blog. He stole the following from his son, and I’m herewith stealing it from him because it reminds me just how crazy so many other people are and so I feel a little saner.
TOP TEN THINGS AMERICA LEARNED FROM THE SCHIAVO CASE
1) Tom Delay is a qualified neurologist.
2) Two dozen court cases weren’t enough to really figure out what’s going on.
3) Michael Schiavo is after money, which is why he turned down millions of dollars to sign over guardianship.
4) Right to life applies only when it’s politically expedient.
5) Medical diagnoses are best performed by watching highly edited videotape rather than in person by trained physicians.
6) Minimum wage-making nursing assistants are more qualified to diagnose a persistent vegetative state than experienced neurologists.
7) Fifteen years in the same persistent state is not really enough time to make an accurate diagnosis.
8) Marriage is the most sacred of all unions, except when it isn’t.
9) Interfering in a family’s private tragedy is a great reason for President Bush to cut short a vacation, but getting a memo that warns of a terrorist attack isn’t.
10) Right-wing pro-lifers are the most compassionate people on Earth, which is why they are robbing gun stores or offering money online to make sure Michael Schiavo dies.