Until recently, I didn’t believe in gnomes. My garden was a serious place, one of toil and concomitant results. I took pride in my accomplishments there, and never noticed my pride elbowing aside my joy.

During this time, I catalogued gnomes under the heading of “lawn crap”, which includes anything needing moved before mowing the lawn. I naively included gnomes with such vulgarities as lawn butts, those annoying plywood cutouts that, from a distance, are supposed to look like the bending over backside of fat people. But gnomes add a bit of whimsey to a garden. And gardening, being such serious business, needs whimsey. Slip over here for more ...

The last few weeks have seen me computerless. A manufacturing problem, left unidentified, caused me to burn out four logic boards and make three 140 mile round trips to the nearest service center. They finally found and fixed the problem. My machine cought up with me in Wisconsin last this last week, and I'm finally clicking keys again.

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