Doing the Write Thing

So I'm sitting out on my driveway, the moon a light yellow balloon rising over the black silhouette of an oak tree, all the lights off, stars overhead. Distant dogs are howling, I don't know if at each other or the rich blood-scented presence of a coyote somewhere in the creekbed blackness. I'm sitting out here to be with my dogs. They were all alone for fourteen hours as I stayed at the office and about flew apart with joy when I came home, so I figured, if I'm going to do the write thing, I'll do it out here where they have the option of sitting at my feet.

Or not. I don't know where they are.

Oh, yes I do. How'd she get so wet?

Alone because my son is just waking up in Venice (It., not CA) and my other son is visiting a friend in San Luis Obispo and my wife is in a motel room near him, as they are on a college-sniffing road trip down away south. Alone because sometimes it's wonderful to be alone -- alone but for howling dogs and peacocks, alone but for crickets and the high-pitched white noise in my ears, alone but for the moon and seventeen oak trees and a thousand visible stars and two dogs and an outside cat. The cat says hi.

Long office days because we have customers who wish to ship product and cannot if our product in turn doesn't work exactly right or, as is often the case, something else in their design doesn't work exactly right and as the major supplier and partner, it is in our interests to help them fix it; and one of these very motivated customers has sent a small team across the ocean to encourage us. Very few things are as motivating to have in your office as a cadre of visiting Japanese businessmen. Or as pleasant, really. The Japanese national character is well refined. I mean, what if they were Germans? Agh.

At the present rate of decay, it will soon be considered impolite, and then politically incorrect, and then hate speech, and then illegal, to refer to concepts such as "national character". Be sure to get your truth now while you can still afford it.

Like any love affair worth remembering, let us keep this posting pointless and short. Howzabout a picture to close it with. Here's me after discovering the cruise ship has run out of Alaskan Amber.