Three letters, the third is D, something that I should be all over right now

If there were a crossword puzzle in the Diamond, would people work through it?

Depending on the clues and the difficulty? Maybe?

I asked a friend this once recently and received an enthusiastic, "You can make those online!" in reply.

Why do I need the internet to put together a crossword for me? Would it be significantly easier than a pencil with a good eraser and some grid paper? I'm seriously asking this. Didn't you guys make crossword puzzles in grade school? Find the common letters and work 'em around crazy-like. It's not like I'm going all Wendell Berry on your asses and completely abandoning the fancy pantsy internet in favor of my wife typing out my thoughts on a typewriter (but that would be, on some anti-feminist level, pretty sweeeeet). I'm just saying that a crossword puzzle is pretty simple to put together, innit? Yeah, for print, it would have to be in digital format... right? Should I straight-edge and ink it to scan for the Diamond? I wonder...

I have... if I fall asleep within the minute, four and a half hours of sleep to go. Not bad, if I don't get hit by another head cold in the morning. It's much more difficult to man up and power through something like a head cold if it's the first thing that hits you when you wake up. Seriously. If I got hit with that in the middle of the day, it wouldn't set me back for more than ten seconds. "The hell was that about?" and then I'd be off, on my bike, to (proceed my efforts to) save the day.

By the way, the clues would be considerably more difficult than the title. That's just fluff. It's tissue paper in the gift bag, breadsticks at the Olive Garden, first-draft play-around-with-the-character-potential shit. Yeah, you get it.

I got another book from the library that isn't required reading. It's called The Tree by Colin Tudge, an English fellow who started a nursery (of the arbor type) when he was eleven.
An excerpt from the beginning, "Many a redwood still standing tall in California was ancient by the time Columbus first made Europe aware that the Americas existed. Yet the redwoods are striplings compared to some of California's pines, which germinated at about the time that human beings invented writing and so are as old as all of written history. These trees out on their parched hills were already impressively old when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, or indeed when Abraham was born. So it is that some living trees have seen the rise and fall of entire civilizations."

If you're reading this, please look up the other titles by this author.

The other day, I took my dog out to yellow yet another patch of our lawn. (It's not a big deal. The dog needs to pee. And we don't really care about our lawn anyway.) And on the other side of our neighbor's house, the sidewalk is lined with enormous and, presumably, semi-ancient, statuesque trees. Except where one should have been (and, a few days before, probably had been standing) was a soily patch of damp earth. Daisy sniffed about the area. I poked at it with my shoe. The dirt was still loose and why was that tree removed? It wasn't that scene from The Virgin Suicides, but it did puzzle me as to why the town (assuming it was the town's decision) decided to take out that particular tree in that row and leave the others standing as monuments to the seasons.

If I were as ballsy during the day as I am at night (right now!), then I might cause a big stink about it.

And I'd also beg for a job a la Fiesta.

Among other things.

-

Uncle Richard, me and James Earl Jones.