Back to...*sigh*...the bee

It's been an interesting 16 years.

Back in 2009, I wrote my first blog post about the bee. I was enthusiastic about it. An article in Time quoted me as saying that when the bee happens, my partner knows that I will drop everything else in my life to watch it.

Well, times change. (As do partners.) For the past few years, I have done everything but drop everything to watch the bee. I've been happy to avoid it. Until this year, which happens to be the bee's centennial.

Bee champions of all ages have been invited to return. There will be more hullabaloo than usual. And after a lot of thought, I decided it would be a bad idea not to return this year. So, here I go again. We'll see what happens. I'll probably have more to post about once the bee is done and I'm back home.

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Well, gosh. I thought I'd have more to write about than that. Guess that's an indication of how little enthusiasm I have for the bee nowadays...even given that the finals are exactly two weeks from today. Oh well.

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Nowadays, my excitement is bound up in a macro called FRedit. It's basically a macro that does all the pre-edit work I typically spend a fair bit of time doing. Eliminate double spaces. Add spaces to either side of em dashes. (At least, this is the style for the business that has hired me on.) Instead of going through a checklist, I can just run this one macro, and it will take care of everything lickety-split. It is effective, getting me to the meat of work. But that sort of work is kinda zen, putting me in the right frame of mind to work, instead of having me jump right in to style questions or even moving sentences or paragraphs so text flows better. However, in the long run, maybe it will make me a more effective editor.

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Have I mentioned that we're in Palm Springs? We're in Palm Springs! We've been renting a place since November in a fabulous gated golf community in Cathedral City called Desert Princess. Our lease on that place expired in April, so we've moved into a new place in the same community. The whole community has over 30 pools, and that doesn't count pools that are on private property. We enjoyed the local pool at the last place we were at—it was maybe 30 feet away from the patio!—, but we decided this time to rent a place that has a pool itself...and it is divine!

Palm Springs has been, weather-wise, pretty damned nice. A wonderful winter, maybe a bit chilly from time to time, but sunny and beautiful for the most part. The only downside—and it has occasionally been a big downside—has been the wind. I typically like wind. But the wind here comes with sand and dust. It has often rendered the air quality among the worst in the nation. Fortunately, it's not always an issue. And as the summer heart turns up, the wind will die away. We're bracing ourselves for a summer full of 100–120º heat. The lack of humidity will be a godsend, but monsoon moisture does rear its ugly head from time to time. It's already hit 109º here at the homestead once...then plummeted down to 78º a few days later. But summer is knocking at the door. I expect that once June hits, we'll rarely be below 100º again until late September.

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I'm also playing the electric guitar again! Partly on Dennis's prodding, I got myself an electric guitar as a 50th birthday present for myself. Then, when I returned to Denver, I realized I missed playing my guitar, so I got a second one for Denver. So now I can play wherever I happen to be. I'm happy about that. I've been taking lessons and making great progress. My teacher, G, is awesome.

Wow. I sound like a teenage girl gushing in her diary about the cutest boy in her English class, don't I? Well, so be it.

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OH! And HUGE news! (If I'm remembered for nothing else, it will be for burying the lede.) Puppy! Literally puppy! Say hello to Brody! He's a chihuahua-terrier mix, two months old and maybe 5 pounds in this picture. Sweet, friendly, fully of energy and love, he's a great continuation of the love we had with Teva and Auggie (and Tango, for Mark and Dennis). We're so happy he's here. Dennis has been badly missing having a dog, so this is a wonderful thing.