Lyman's father came by early yesterday to pick up a cricket box. He was going up to the lake to fish with a friend for bream.

Luck must not have been so good, since he brought back a bucket of small catfish retrieved from a trap at Lyman's brother's property.

"They're small. They're good skinned and fried whole this way. Y'all can do what you want with them. They sure are good fried whole."

Was that a hint, ya think?

Craig's bird-focused Sunday Comics is especially good this week.

Ahhhh. Life in the country, where, for all the frogs and crickets and cicadas, you can't hear yourself think. Quiet nights in the country. Bah.

I am preparing for my annual stint as the recorder for the River City League's fantasy baseball draft. Tomorrow we'll meet at the Elks' hall for the yearly event.

There are eight teams this year, and all the owners are the nicest of gentlemen, but, by gosh, it is about the most boring four or five hours I spend a year -- worse than a drive to Dallas. This will be, I think, my tenth year. This baton needs to pass along.

Lyman provides me with lists so that I don't have to spell names phonetically, and so I can distinguish between the five Fernandez boys.

Lucy has come up with what she thinks is a cute new trick.

When she wakes up and gets tired of being alone in the morning, she knocks her beak against her cage walls in perfect imitation of someone knocking on the door. Once or twice I have come running.

It worked well while workers were on and off the lot working on the greenhouse. Not so well now that it's about done.

Lyman and I took a walkthrough of the greenhouse yesterday. It has a heater and a fan and a mister and a sink and a couple grands' worth of hydroponic equipment that hasn't been hooked up yet. 16' x 24'. I've lived in less luxurious apartments. All three of my cars cost less. Added together.

"Lyman, this is the perfect place for you and Lucy to stay while I do spring cleaning."

He laughed. Not such a good idea, Daddy-O.

What a haul!

I've been to the dollar stores for serious work clothes: 3 tops at $3 apiece, 4 capri and other cotton pants for $27.

I'm ready now, Buster.

UPDATE: But not for bluster. The wind is blowing against the direction I need to rake. I wasn't born yesterday.

Sometime in the next few days, the patient peregrines on the 33rd floor of San Francisco's PG&E building should reap their reward.

Professional observers project April 9 as the hatch date. Then there should be more to see on the cam as the little ones grow.

The brand new Possum Thursday Three:

#1) If there was one thing you could change about the way you look, what would it be?

Not yet, but my inescapable destiny evidenced by my mother's mother, mother and her sisters, and my sister, is that as I age I will have droopy jowls. No amount of exercise, or eating right, or yoga will prevent them. Both my sister and I are considering corrective measures when the time comes. She goes first.

#2) In your house, right now, what is your favorite piece of artwork that you have displayed?

A wall hanging done by a co-op in Zimbabwe that we found in a zoo along the Gulf Coast. It is a vibrant village scene done with batik, stamping and painting. 54" x 77". It hangs in the entry of the house. A lot of art for $150.

#3) What person living now would you most like to meet?

Right now, I'd like to meet Terry Oglesby. We've had an online correspondence for three years and have never met face to face.

A Land's End catalog came this week. We have an online account for Land's End.

I found a v-neck tank top in the book in colors I like for $8 apiece, and ordered some.

In the receipt for the order, they included a link to a virtual model. It was my first experience with one.

Age, height, weight, measurements, body type, coloring, eyeshape and hairstyle were options. Turned up with a girl who looked pretty much like me, but her butt's too wide and her belly's too flat.

It was kind of fun. Boys can do it, too: My Virtual Model

UPDATE: This is cooler than paper dolls! Cooler than Barbie!! Not that I look a thing like Barbie, mind you.

I like birds and I like strawberries:

"I ain't ever in my life seen the likes of these birds," Young said. "They ain't scared. That's the bad part about it. . . . They catch us not looking and they'll swoop down and sit in that patch for 30 minutes." [...]

[...] A first-time strawberry farmer who hopes to expand to 100 acres next year, Relan said he solved his cedar waxwing problem the same way farmers across Tangipahoa have for years. The few farmers who have tried air cannons realize they've wasted their money when the birds are so undaunted by the devices that they use them for perches, he said.

What to do, what to do? Shooting them is against the law.

This story has a slew of good quotes from country boys.

Oh, for pity's sake:

Arkansas coach Houston Nutt has decided that his players who are caught loafing will no longer wear pink jerseys during practices in an effort to avoid offending breast cancer survivors.

There's a better argument that the pink is insulting to all women.

I imagine Coach Nutt has been running his slack players in pink far longer than breast cancer survivors have been wearing pink ribbons.

My gosh, what a mess. I've just balanced our checkbook, which required going through transactions back to December.

Lyman and I keep one checkbook between us. But he is the one that usually visits the ATM, or makes online deposits into the account. And we ran out of register for a few days in January, which accounts for the discrepancies.

The $%&##$^% thing has been a churning urn of burning funk for the past three months anyway.

But it's all done now. Mostly. I hope.

Here's a little story of insurance fraud in the Garden District of New Orleans.

I do not know how Pope John Paul II could have died in anything less than peace when he lived so near Michelangelo's Pieta.

I saw it in pictures. I have seen it in life.

Lay me, too, in the lap of Mary.

It's the only thing in the world I think worth stealing.

From Smiley Anders today in the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Dear Smiley: You recently ran a story about a guy who went to a restaurant in Cleveland and saw crawfish on the menu for $13.99 a pound. I can top that.

I am originally from Fordoche. After I graduated from Northwestern in Natchitoches, I worked for two years as a national consultant for Sigma Nu fraternity. My travels took me to 73 universities across the country.

One year I spent Mardi Gras at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. One of the alumni owned a popular bar and grill, and upon finding that I was from Louisiana invited me to a Mardi Gras party.

He told me they would be serving boiled crawfish flown up from Louisiana as well as jambalaya, so I eagerly accepted.

When I got to the restaurant I went directly for the food, as I was feeling the ill effects of having to eat Midwestern food for some time.

When I got to the front of the line, I told the lady serving that I wanted some crawfish.

She asked politely, "How many?"

Imagine the look on my face when she told me they were selling them three for a dollar!

I didn't know what to say. I remember stuttering out "Nine." I didn't eat any of them, but instead peeled them and gave them to the Nebraska guys I had brought along.

Jeremy Lacombe

Houston

The last live crawfish we bought were $1 a pound. Some of the largest ever seen here were six to a pound.

I know nearly nothing about Vatican procedure.

How long will the bell toll announcing the death of Pope John Paul II?

Then the mule said, "I'm done today. You can walk home."

And the oak leaves have continued to fall.

Lyman called the guy who came earlier and was told his bagger had blown out, most of his big clients had been serviced, and that he would not repair it, but invest in a new unit this fall.



There is an old-fashioned, inefficient thing called a rake, I'm told, which coupled with a tarp, is a dandy device for putting one's back out.

Caladiums, either.

How am I ever going to be able to till the front bed to plant impatiens?

The bed is beside the front porch, under a large live oak. It's a shady place. If I ever get them in, we'll have brilliant flowers until the first hard freeze this fall.

But we're running on a schedule of two sunny, two rainy days. The ground will never dry enough to run the Mantis at this rate.