Good for you to be able to find a place to donate the long locks! And I've had those clogged drains with kids with long hair, even with drain sieves; it's still tree roots that are the worst drainage block here.

Today I drove to Dallas to talk over all of the changes that will happen on the website and the shift to podcasting. I could have added to my work on the business side but declined the offer. I got enough of a look at the new website to make a plan for how to preserve some content that would otherwise be lost in the transition.

I don't use a GPS system. With Google maps on the computer I write my list of roads and turns for a trip. The freeways in Dallas typically have long stretches of red - a standstill - and I hate being stuck on freeways. My trip there was via freeways at midday, but heading home in late afternoon I decided to take a cross-country route straight through downtown on what amount to the oldest roads, the earliest streets established through downtown, ("Main" and "Fort Worth Ave," etc.) across the river, under several of the freeways, and out west to home. I passed Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was shot. It was a beautiful drive, and I saw parts of town I've only heard about like Deep Ellum (think Stevie Ray Vaughn and others). I did a few miles of freeway in between, but then dropped into town near my university and took the same old highway system west into Fort Worth. It was a beautiful drive on a sunny afternoon and I feel like I visited the real Dallas. My employer lives in a historic area in the old town three blocks east of the historic Swiss Avenue with its gorgeous old Classic Revival houses probably from the era of railroad magnates and cotton gin owners (there are neighborhoods like this in towns all through Texas, built on railroad, cattle, mining, and farming dollars). After reading about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge last year, Swiss Avenue reminds me of the houses on Columbia Heights overlooking the East River (and that area discussed in the recent Ken Burns documentary about the American Revolution).

During this trip I got my hands on a small self-published booklet from one of the authors my employer worked with years ago. She is long gone, but there are traces on the Internet about her work with saffron. The book isn't in the Library of Congress, no ISBN associated, so I am going to scan it and turn it into a PDF that they can either put up on the new site or sell as a small item (print on demand) on the Amazon store (to be set up soon). This is a real treasure!