Spring? What spring?

The days are getting longer, the sun angle is getting higher with every passing day, yet here in Minnesota we still have nine inches of snow or so on the ground. Today's high will be somewhere around 25 degrees. In my backyard there's a neat effect where the snow closest to the house (north side) is never out of the shadow of the house and is still two feet deep. Farther to the back of the yard, where the sun shines, the snow is dwindling down to only a few inches and even a few bare patches. Last year spring was well underway by this time. I planted the sunflowers on May 1, although May 15 is the generally accepted last frost date. Mag and I did buy some seeds yesterday. We've decided to cut down to a few crops for maximum productivity for our limited space. Tentatively we're planning cucumbers, tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers, and maybe some carrots. Our novelty crop this year will be a funky type of melon that I already forget the name of.

What we really want to have happen is for the lakes to thaw. Mag and I have been talking about getting a canoe for quite a while now, and with a few weeks to go before paddling season starts, it's the best time of the year to buy one. This is a buying guide that Paddling magazine has put together. It's a neat guide that allows many ways to sort what you want. Mag and I are looking for a canoe that we can take out nearly every night on Lake Phalen, which is about a mile from our house, as well as to take camping. There are a number of campsites in Minnesota that are canoe-in only, so with a fun paddle across a remote lake we can have a campground all to ourselves. Cool!

Most major canoe manufacturers also have their own websites. Wenonah makes a number of very nice models, one of which we're looking at. Mad River is another big manufacturer, and Old Town also produces comparable options. Bell canoe makes nice canoes, but the site is all Flash and pretty annoying on an underpowered computer.

I'll do a bloggage sometime about places to take your canoe.

Update and further link jettison

My first experience ever with newsgroups was when Jeff showed me one called alt.sex.plushies, which was a group dedicated to people who LOVED their stuffed animals a little too much, if you know what I mean. You ask why I even refer to this, right? This link is to a page where you can buy a stuffed moose. When I say stuffed, you know what I mean. Like, is that a flying squirrel in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Via notsosoft.

The top 100 reasons we love Rasheed Wallace.
6.Reporter had to go to the student union arcade to try to find him to do an interview because that's where he always was, playing NBA Jam or Mortal Kombat II.
59.Admitted that weasely media-type John Feinstein was the reason he often forced himself to get up and actually go to class.
62.Boyhood bedroom was a basketball court, complete with foul lines drawn on the floor.

Strom Thurmond's estranged wife (she's 52 to his 98; picture from 1987 here) is making it very clear she doesn't plan on taking over his seat if he is incapacitated. I saw Strom on the Senate floor when I visited in 1990. He looked damn near catatonic then; I can't believe he's won two more elections since then. It reminds me of a fringe argument we sometimes ran in debate at the end of Deng Xiaoping's reign in China; there were people that said that Deng was already dead and the Chinese just weren't telling us. It made a good answer to "when Deng dies, then the disad kicks in" scenarios. (Yeah, I digress.) Anyway, if Strom died, who would tell?