Entry 8:

Ginger,

So. The second day (as opposed to the pretentious but faddish "day two," which I suspect got picked up from bad movie scripts). The doe has emerged down by the pond--I saw her yesterday afternoon foraging. I should explain to our readers that we live on a four-acre glade inside a 40-acre forested wildlife preserve, hence the turkey gobbling outside our bedroom window, the young coyote that spent the morning last week lounging in the grass south of the house listening to the crows bitch him out, and the deer. The does lay up in nests in the spring, so the doe emerging means her faun (or fauns; she's had twins for the past two years) has grown enough for her to leave long enough for a stretch and a graze. In another few weeks we'll have fauns gamboling on the pond margins. But you're not fond of deer, are you, m'dear.

This is a good occasion to thank you publicly for making my coffee every morning, especially since you drink tea. Danke. Gracias. It's great coffee. I miss it when I travel. Why do hotels serve such bad coffee? Do they want to drive you out of your room so they can clean it?

I grazed "The Fray" yesterday (speaking of grazing) and saw a couple of comments that deserved answer. Someone wanted to know what "lekking" was. When I don't know a word, I look it up in a dictionary (in fact, I keep the O.E.D. on CD-ROM up on my desktop whenever I'm writing for just that purpose). Here's the O.E.D.'s definition: "Lek: n.1, a patch of ground used by groups of birds of certain species, esp. blackcock, during the breeding season, as a setting for the males' display and their meeting with the females; the display itself or the season during which it takes place."

Then someone challenged my comments about the Kid's crazy zillion-billion-dollar National Missile Defense by invoking Britain's Chain Home early-warning radar system that helped the British defeat the Luftwaffe early in World War II. But we already have that in the form of satellites that look for suspicious activity and listen in to communications down to the walkie-talkie and cell-phone level. We used to listen to the members of the Politburo talking on their car phones. But most of what I wanted to say about the absurdity of NMD was said very well this morning by Tom Friedman in his column on the Times' op-ed page, so I won't take up that argument here.

This is getting both longwinded and serious. My wit isn't awake yet. On the light(er) side, I read in my Enquirer this morning that Janet Jackson has a pierced "rhymes with Dolores." Ouch! Why do people DO that? Maybe it's the bad hotel coffee?

So it was a hairy flight yesterday, was it? Count on (don't count on) the New England weather.

Yours for sunny California skies (but bring your batteries),

Rhodeman