April . . .

. . . may be the cruelest month around here: tornado sirens again yesterday, followed by a 5-minute gully washer that included marble-sized hail. Knocked the phone out and it's still not back on. On the other hand, finally had two days in a row of warm, dry weather to finish the media unit for the bedroom. Never used gel stain before and it is marvelous stuff: you can use a disposable foam brush, second coat goes on with rags, not necessary to sand between coats; just used #250 sandpaper before I began. Results above. Beauty, eh? Gene Colwitz and I made the doors, I mounted the hardware (perfectly, of course). You can see how it matches the corner shelf (in mirror), the lamp wood and my silent butler. What you can't see is the bedspread and shams, which is where Erin got the accent color (called Java by the stain company, Espresso by designers after three Cosmos). We have the most beautiful bedroom in creation. And only Louis XIV had a bigger one. Oh, and that's the 26-incher LCD I bought for my Torrance apartment. Talk about perfect fit!

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Take a look at my elder daughter's blogpage (www.loadedword.blogspot.com): great pic of me during my last visit instructing the boys on the finer points of hoops during that first weekend of March Madness. They actually listened. For ten minutes. Long enough to get the pic, anyway. Poor guys: it would be like me trying to keep track of the puck during televised hockey. Never could.

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Milestone today: my 100th workout at the local YMCA since 1 July, when I joined. Have gone from 30,000 lbs./week to 41,500. I guess that's progress. Wish the Fitlinxx system could transfer; I had a year's worth of workouts in San Pedro and two year's worth in Torrance. But it doesn't matter: they don't give away T-shirts here for achieving the levels, anyway. I'm working on brown: already have white, yellow and red that I got from Peedro and Torrance. I need to bitch to the Bama manager about that.

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Speaking of bitching: did I tell you that they tax food in this state? Unbelievable: that's the most regressive tax imaginable. On the other hand, property and income taxes are nothing around here, which of course helps the rich. Welcome to the Red-State South. Damned Republicans.

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So this has evolved from ThreeDot journalism to ThreeAsterisk journalism. Thanks for the read, Buddy: that makes three. 'Preeshate it, as the coaches and car salesman say. Off to the Y and the dog park now; Erin off to an extra rehearsal. It's a long time until college football season; baseball is boring and golf is for tastelessly dressed Republicans. Sigh. How they must hate that the best in the game is buff, handsome, Stanford-educated, and half-black. Snicker. Neither is a sport, by they way, they're both games. And I'm not as hard-ass as Hemingway, who said that there were only three sports: bullfighting, boxing and rugby; all the rest are games.