cows and more cows!

Despite living 4 miles from my workplace, my daily commute is ~52 miles round trip. This is because Elder Daughter goes to school in a different town, which means I need to drive her north to and from school every day, and the Sprogs are in daycare in the lower reaches of a town to the south.

Now, 52 miles is a haul, but it's a nice commute nonetheless. My commute encompasses forests and fields, mountains and wide plains, 3 traffic lights, 1 stop sign, and 4 different kinds of cows. On alternate Fridays, when I stop at my chiropractor on my way in to work, it also includes bison. When spring comes, it'll include sheep, goats, and a solitary vicuña; the llamas and the ostrich are just far enough out of the way to not be regular sights. Today also included wild turkeys, which are not at all uncommon.

The four kinds of cows are Holsteins (who come in a farm with an ice cream stand attached!), Jerseys, a bunch of large black cows that I really don't think are Angus, and my very favorites, the Belted Galloways (aka, the "Oreo Cows").

So, other than the wear and tear on my car and the cost of gas (thankfully much lower than last summer) it's not a bad commute at all.

read without rhythm and you won't attract the words

After work had to go out and pick up a prescription for the littlest bug, and in a moment of weakness the elder bug talked me into stopping at Narnes & Boble so we could pick up the latest installment of her favorite manga. While there, I passed a very nice "New Paperback" display at the front of the store and staring me in the face were many copies of Margaret Ronald's Spiral Hunt[1]. Yay! A copy was immediately and without hesitation acquired and it has gone straight to the very top of the to-read pile. If I weren't already more than half-way through the current piece of fluff I'm reading, it may very well have skipped the queue entirely and pre-empted the book-in-progress.

[1] Maggie is one of the cooler people on the planet, her short fiction kicks ass, and this is her very first novel. I say again: Yay!