I remember that episode with the woodchucks. Emptying the commode there doesn't make the garden sound very appealing.

Thursday is the first day of Spring (on the calendar) but my neighbor across the street swears that the best time to plant tomatoes is after Easter. That's too late for me this year, April 20, but I'll have the gardens worked and ready once it seems like the soil has warmed up enough.

Yesterday I picked up the three Lord of the Ring books at the library because my copies date back to when I was in college and they're falling apart. I read some Amazon reviews about the maps in some of the books - in the late-1980s or so a woman redrew the maps but LOTR purists complain that she got things wrong. On the way home I visited my half-price bookstore where they had several shelves of many volumes of the books so I compared the maps and editions. I settled on a single book with all three sections and with the clearest old maps. It seems to have trimmed a little off of Tolkien's original map of Mordor, but I can refer back to the older book (and they never actually travel that far south, which is probably why it was trimmed.)

Anyway, I now have the old set of the books on my library shelves and the newer book I'm reading. I pursued this edition because I'm rereading all of these books (and The Hobbit) before watching my Director's cut version of the LOTR films (they left a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor that was restored in each director's cut). And because I want to get back into the habit of regular reading in the evening, not just for a few minutes at bedtime. No surprise that something has to go to get that time, and that something will be facebook. I'm not reading it nearly as much now and I set up groups that I can glance at to follow the people I really want to know about.

SRS