It's spring, and things are growing everywhere. A week and a half ago, we transplanted our seedlings of lettuce, arugula, and leek, and planted beet, snap pea, and spinach seeds that have just sprouted in the last day or two. We also took the plants that lived over the winter--a lot of lettuce and parsley, a few cilantro plants, and two oregano plants--and put them in rows, and they are all getting quite big! The rhubarb has exploded, the raspberries are full of leaves and sending up new stalks all over the place, and over half the strawberry plants have flowers already. Our daffodils in the front are already done blooming, and the tulips started taking over a few days ago. The redbuds and magnolias have been in bloom: in fact, we noticed one magnolia yesterday that had already lost almost all of its flowers. It's all so exciting, but at the same time, there's just a little bit of teasing annoyance: when will we finally get to *eat* things from the garden? We're hoping the (overwintered) lettuce and strawberries will be within the next two weeks, but most everything else will be at the end of May or later.

I think (I hope!) that my health problems are improving. There's never really all that much to say on this front, as any improvement usually seems fleeting. But my knees are clearly better (though not yet pain-free), and I'm pretty sure the same is true of my shoulder and stomach. Healing just takes so much time! It seems like it will still be a long time till I can go running and freely drink tea and wine, eat oranges and spicy food, and relax on my left arm. We'll see. Hopefully all these restrictions on what I can do will pay off.

And I've become a computer parts seller! After months of not wanting to deal with it, I finally took apart my old, destroyed computer and listed all the parts on eBay. I looked up what similar parts had sold for, and tried to list for a little under that, since most people with the patience to take apart laptops are certified computer parts dealers with really good methods of testing. Even so, the total list price was unimaginably high. I'm sure not everything will sell at what I have it listed for--some things may not sell at all. But two sold today--my first two--and it's kind of exciting to finally be getting rid of my old computer (and at a profit).

Finally, I need to write my paper for the conference in May. Somehow, writing conference papers is always agonizing: something about the combination of the spoken format, the limited time period, and the inevitably speculative nature of music theory make putting ideas together difficult. First, I agonize over what exactly the thrust of the paper will be; then, I write (probably the easiest part); then, I spend hours and hours tediously cutting material because inevitably it's too long; and finally, I agonize over it until the last minute, editing right down to the wire. And all for a 20 minute speech to an audience that won't know much about 16th-century music, and a brief line on my resume. Is it really worth it? Who knows.

Off to post my computer parts and write my paper...