This week’s headline:  ”iPod better than beer with college students”!  It was close, but iPods beat out beer for the most “in” thing on campus by a 73-71% margin. Surely this is a sign of the apocalypse. Beer is beating out the iPod here in Vermont, too, as the monsoon continues. We had one day of sunshine in the last two weeks and it looks like this weekend is going to be a washout as well. Maybe we are paying for the mild winter we had this year. It just doesn’t seem fair that our three and a half days of summer are rainy.

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We had great weather for the trip to Maine and we caught a Memorial Day parade on the way home in Rochester, New Hampshire. It’s been rainy ever since, with some big thunderstorms in the afternoons. We managed to get all the screens installed but the garden is behind schedule because of the wet ground. It looks like it will be a good year for apples, though (the kind that grow on trees!). I’ve been trying to grow apples for as long as I have lived in Warren and have yet to have a good crop. My micro-climate is not conducive to apple growing, but the mild spring seems to have helped this year as my trees were covered with blossoms. Maybe 30 years of pruning and fertilizing will finally pay off.

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Wettest May on record in Vermont. We had missed most of the most serious flooding but got hammered over the past week or so. There was moderate flooding here in the Mad River Valley but some roads were underwater just north of here. It was also in the 40s and 50s most of the week and we even had some snow up on the mountains! It’s a good thing it didn’t snow at my house-I might have pulled up stakes immediately and headed south. Instead I spent much of Saturday doing spoon work to fill the potholes in my driveway.

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Rain and more rain! We were spared from the flooding that hammered our neighbors to the south but it has been raining steadily for the last two weeks. The Mad River is high and it is raining heavily today. We did get a slight break in the weather yesterday as Hapy and I took Artie out on the Killington Golf Course to do his performance review. (Ten years for Art!) As we headed down Route 100 it was raining but as we hit Rochester the sun started to peak out and we had a great round of golf (the weather, not the play!). Then on the way home it started to rain again. I had a meeting in Burlington later that day and on the way home I ran into a lightning storm like none that I have seen. There were repeated lightning strikes, some of them big horizontal bolts and others flashing to the ground on either side of my car as I drove. The flashes blinded me and some of them seemed to leave crackling embers of burning air.

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It seems like the landscape went from brown to green in an instant as I look out the window here at Small Dog. The maple trees have their leaves now and the pastures have reacted to the manure spread by our neighbor by bursting into brilliant green. We expect a lot of rain today and this weekend which will cause the foliage to expand even more. Mark Engelhardt is out this week to work on our shopping cart but I roped him into helping me with some motorcycle projects while he was here, too. We tried to put the sidecar back together but I had measured wrong and when I had the axle turned down to accommodate the Victory wheel, I neglected to measure the necessary axle length. Fortunately, there is enough material to add an inch so it’s off to the machine shop today.

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The snapping turtle that spends the winter buried in the mud by the bocce field slowly made its way toward the river yesterday, drawing a crowd for the second year in a row. Joyce looked up the date and it was May 4th last year, too, when the turtle made the journey down to the Mad River. Spring must truly be here! Things are looking green and the poplar trees that are the last to lose their leaves in the fall are the first to have leaves in the spring.

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Dear Friends,

The sun is out and Hapy has the top down on his roadster. I changed the oil in all of the motorcycles but I must be getting old because I didn’t ride in to work this morning once I looked at the temperature and saw that it was 25 degrees. Remember last year, when I had all the difficulty with my red motorcycle and its charging circuit? I took it out of storage at my mom’s condo up in Burlington and had a hard time getting it started. It’s a long story but we ended up taking the sidecar off the bike and loading the bike into the trailer to take to the dealer for some repair work. While it was there, I asked them to see if they could figure out the charging issue. It turns out that there was a bent bracket in the primary case that was shorting to the stator which in turn had fried the voltage regulator. Long story short, the bike is ready to roll!  I’m heading over to Enfield, New Hampshire, to pick it up on Saturday.

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Dear Friends,

Grace and I awoke to the screams of a fisher cat in our yard at about 1:00 AM.  Knowing that Mothra, our cat, was outside (she has decided that in the warm weather she is an outside cat) we hoped that she had a safe hiding place. The dogs leaped out of bed and started barking, but Hammerhead was so scared that he immediately jumped back into bed between us and shivered. What a baby! Fortunately, Mothra was waiting at the door in the morning, but with spring come all the critters and we are going to have to try to convince her to stay inside at night.

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It was Passover on Wednesday, Good Friday today, Easter on Sunday, and Tax day on Monday.  Here in New England, we get an extra day to file our taxes this year because Monday is Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts where we file our taxes, so the deadline is the 18th. There are signs of spring all over, including the flock of about 25 wild turkeys that were causing a ruckus in my yard early in the morning. The best sign of spring for me was that they graded my road and I was able to get the motorcycle out for the first ride of the year!

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It took eight airports, six airplanes, two rental cars and 48 hours to get home from Hawaii but we finally got home this week. It’s no wonder that Delta’s Comair commuter airline is rated near the bottom of the pack. We flew from Hilo to Honolulu, spent the 8-hour layover with Hapy and Jessica who where on the way to Maui and then flew to Atlanta where things began to get positively weird.  The plane from Atlanta to Cincinnati was delayed because they didn’t have a flight attendant so we missed the plane to Burlington so they sent us to Cleveland but the pilot for that plane got sick so we missed the plane to Burlington again. This time we had to spend the night in Cleveland and flew the next day to Dulles Airport but the flight attendant for the plane to Burlington was late and by the time we got to Burlington, the plane tried to land but ended up getting diverted to Albany where they were going to put us on a bus.  Grace and I rented a car for the last part of the journey and were relieved that our luggage actually made it to Burlington before we did!

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Hello, everyone!

Tomorrow is Apple’s 30th birthday and what a long, strange trip it’s been. I just had to throw that in to add fire to the Apple vs. Apple battle raging in the courts. I might face some hate mail when I say this, but I just don’t know why Apple Records feels the need to continue the battle. Are they just after the money? IMHO, Apple Records should go “quietly into the good night” and hand the torch to Apple Computer. Will Gwyneth Paltrow be next on the list for litigation?

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March is steadily marching on! We haven’t yet had any of that spring weather that makes one want to throw open windows and rid the home of stale winter air, but its only a matter of time now. The forecast keeps hinting that it will be here soon, barring any late snowstorms.

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Hello, everyone!

Since I’m writing this on March 17th, I have to mention St. Patrick’s Day. This made me wonder what happened to the shamrock shake served by McDonalds? I’m a child of the TV era, one of the baby boomers who grew up with Gilligan’s Island reruns and the Brady Bunch in prime time. When the shamrock shake ads first appeared, we HAD to have one. Not liking mint, I didn’t particularly care for the shamrock shake but my brother loved them. Every year we’d make the family trek to McDonald’s, with three kids in the back of the station wagon. A sure sign that spring was around the corner was the shamrock shake.

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Don is away in Hawaii so Ed, Holly, and I will be manning the Kibbles helm this week (and for the next several weeks). If you have ideas for articles for the newsletter or discussions for the Dog Food for Thought Pawcast, let us know. Your wish is our command!

It’s been a quiet week for Apple, with no new announcements. CeBIT is going on now in Hanover, Germany. CeBIT is the “world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments.” You may have heard that Microsoft et al were to announce products called UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) – better known in the Apple world as Newtons. The products announced at the show a few days ago are really just prototypes, with battery time limited to about 15 minutes. (Now that’s some microprocessing!)

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Everyone around here is telling me I am in “one foot out the door” mode for pre-vacation. It seems like I am working harder than ever but I guess they see that faraway look in my eyes at the prospect of lounging around in bare feet and swimming trunks while they shovel snow and bundle up. I recorded our next Dog Food for Thought Pawcast this week with an interview with Rick Estes from QuickerTek and a debate with Ed about whether the new Mac mini is truly a “media center.” We are continuing that debate on Barkings <www.blog.smalldog.com> and in this issue of Kibbles & Bytes in our Point/Counterpoint with Morgan and I going head to head!

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I’m surprised that I do not see maple sugar buckets already. After one of the warmest Januaries on record it sure looks like February is following suit. It has rained so much that our neighbor, John Osgood, walked in this morning and declared us as the new Seattle. Skiers and snowmobilers are hoping that some of this precipitation turns to snow to salvage the season.

I’ve been in Vermont for over 35 years and notice a steady warming trend. There were years that it seldom got above zero in January and the low temperatures hit -40. How’s it been in your neck of the woods? It was a statement like this, where I added the off hand comment “I guess global warming is real”, that launched the soapbox portion of Kibbles & Bytes as I received hundreds of emails.

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