He's got jelly beans for Tommy, colored eggs for sister Sue

[austin_dern]

For Easter we observed some of what've become our traditions: the day before we put our pet rabbit against his protests into the carrier and took him to bunny_hugger's parents, where we would spend the night. This was the first time we'd been together with them, and their increasingly frail dogs, since Christmas (although both she and I had made individual visits to them). So I'm glad we had the time to spend just being around.

Decorating Easter eggs --- we had got four dozen from the farmer's market --- was the major activity of the evening. The major activity ahead of actually dyeing the eggs was trying to guess which of the nine color tablets we had was actually pink (because the pink was supposed to be mixed with water rather than vinegar, or maybe vice-versa) and we could not agree which the colors was pink. Every plausible alternative turned out to be some other color and we had to settle for concluding that one I'd thought was orange was actually meant to be pink. All we could say is no color turned out anything like what it looked like in tablet form.

But the egg decorating was a big step up from watching the Michigan State game; that's the one in which the Spartans apparently decided that four minutes of playing was enough for their Final Four game and went on to lose by something like 620 points, finally. We had started out attentively watching the game, and as the rout continued, just sort of everyone drifted off to their computers or books or worrying over the dogs or such.

While getting ready for bed I discovered that the thing I packed which I thought was a pair of black sweatpants suitable for pajama duty was actually a black shirt that wouldn't fit so well over my legs. This is what I get for not sweating and over-thinking my packing one time. I also failed to bring a change of socks.

Trivia: John Locke used the pineapple as an example of the impossibility of words to convey direct sensory expressions, in Essay Concerning Human Understanding: ``He that thinks otherwise, let him try if any words can give him a taste of a pine apple, and make him have the true idea of the relish of that celebrated delicious fruit''. Source: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan, Tamim Ansary.