I know, I know. I encouraged you to work through the subscriber sign-up, and now, nothing?
We’re leaving this morning and won’t be back until the 22nd, so no posts for the duration, but please don’t go away!

(I’m speaking to you from the bottom of the page — back on top just to proof-read. Now I see on the side bar that I have two comments! Hooray! But if I try to read them, I get a warning that if I leave this page I lose everything on it. Come on, computer, that’s not nice. I just want to peek? Okay, after I hit Publish, I’ll call up a new screen and see what you have to say. In advance, thanks for joining in!)

See, I can’t tell if anyone actually has subscribed, so I’m making a hopeful leap here that one or more of you, whoever you are, may have. (Hey, apparently someone has!) And I don’t have anything now to tell you about the farm, except to say that we had a nice meeting with the architect. I’m sure you’re not interested in learning if we decided for or against an appliance garage, and the dimensions of the fire-pit where Larry hopes to do some serious barbecue, so I’ll just tell you a little story instead.

We have new neighbors across the elevator lobby here in the Crane Bldg. They’re darling, nice, have come here from South Africa, and oh, to the point, young. At least to our eyes. So I was telling them the numeric code which gets the elevator to our floor. “It’s four-four-four-four-four-pound-P.” The woman looked puzzled, glanced at her husband, who translated: “hashtag-P,” he gently explained. Now was the problem her South African provenance or her youth? #Millennials!

Of course that wasn’t the real code, so if you come to visit us, please let me know and I”ll give you the real secret number . . .

Larry keeps wandering into my office, keys jingling, looks at me with that I NEED my coffee face, are you almost through? So for now, see you again on the 22nd. Thanks!