Noah and the Sandbox.

This weekend was warm and sunny, which means that Noah played outside for the vast majority of it. Mostly, he sat around, moving dirt about in the patch of his lawn that I believe is officially called a "garden," but which appears to this simple observer to be a sort of sandbox for adults.



You be the judge, readers.



The warm weather also brought the fortuitous coincidence of my finishing a bottle of olive oil and some wild daisies springing up in our backyard. So for the next few days, anyway, we'll have some fresh flowers on the table.

(And for the rest of the spring, we'll have an ungodly ant infestation.)

Meet Our Neighbor, Noah.

One of the real delights of springtime is having the windows open again so you can spy and eavesdrop on your eccentric neighbors. The man who lives in the lawn adjacent to ours (the site of this year's Blackbird Convention, you'll remember) provides endless treats when the warm weather starts.


We call him Noah because he keeps a large boat in his backyard, even though we live in a decidedly landlocked part of the country.

 


From time to time, Noah hauls his boat from one side of the yard to the other. This weekend was pretty busy.




Later, while digging his garden patch with some loud, gas-powered machinery, Noah even began praying quite loudly when something caused the machine to stop working.
 

What a delight neighbors are!

The Neighbors Are Listening to "Rocketman." And That's an Improvement.

Children, be glad we no longer live where the past versions of your father and I who wrote this blog lived. This weekend was some epic drinking event for the undergrads at the university here in Carbondale. And because we share walls with our neighbors, who happen to be undergrads,* we got generously invited to share in this experience. By way of their gratuitously loud music. Which made our walls shake until roughly 3 in the morning.


Unfortunately, this photo doesn't capture the sound (how quaint, you must be thinking). But you can see by your father's expression roughly what he thinks about our neighbors' manners.

As you know, if those young men next door had been you, they would have gotten quite the stern talking-to.



*They are in their eighth year of study.