How do you know it's spring?

I asked Augie, "How do you know it's spring?" Here's what he said:

When the groundhog casts his shadow
And the small birds sing
And the pussywillows happen
And the sun shines warm
And when the peepers peep
Then it is Spring.

He was quoting, verbatim, from Margaret Wise Brown's Pussy Willow, a Little Golden Book first published in 1951. Pussy Willow, a little gray kitten, encounters a frog ("peeper") who asks "How do you know it's Spring?" When Pussy Willow doesn't know, the peeper answers with those six lines.

When we first brought this book out last fall, I wasn't sure Augie would like the flowery language, but in fact he asked to reread it many times. We hadn't gone back to it for at least a couple of months when he recited this passage to me.

I've learned you don't know what they're going to like until you try it, and you don't know what's in their minds until you ask! And even the most old-fashioned stories can still charm a child.

(FYI, I see that Amazon has a newer version with a new illustrator.)

How not to be a "noreply" person

I love getting and responding to comments. I use email--you leave a comment on one of my posts, it shows up in my inbox, I hit "reply" and talk back to you. We may even have a little conversation that goes back and forth a few times.

Sometimes I hit "reply" and instead of an email address I see "noreply." I'm always a little disappointed, and I know I'm not the only one. In fact I learned about this from other bloggers who were complaining about the "noreply" people. Oops, I was one of them.

So how do you get comments on your comments? Just make an email address public in your Blogger profile. Set up a separate email account just for blogging if you want to protect your privacy. To link it to your profile:

* Sign into your Blogger account and click on "Customize" at the upper right corner of the screen.
* Click on "Dashboard," and then on "Edit Profile."
* Click on "Show my email address."
* Scroll down and click "Save Profile."

You're done.

If you'd like to receive comments by email, here's how to set that up:

* On the "Dashboard" or the "Layouts" page, click on "Settings" and then "Comments."
* Scroll down to "Comment Notification Email" and fill in your email address.
* Click "Save Settings."

If you haven't been doing this, I think you'll be surprised at how much more interactive blogging can become.

April 15, 1985: The Meeting

The date: April 15, 1985. At 10 a.m. my graphic designer and I met with the company that did the typesetting for our college's alumni tabloid. We had gotten our first computer at the office, and sent files of all the stories to the typesetter. The process should have been faster and cheaper than the old system, when typesetters had to retype everything into their machines. But they had messed it up, needlessly keyboarding a lot of stuff, introducing errors, and then charging us to correct their mistakes.

On this morning, the company's sales manager and account rep introduced us to a third person--a man who had joined the company less than an hour earlier. "He knows a lot about this process," they said. "He is taking over this department." He looked through the file, including my letter of complaint. "You're right, we messed up your job," he said. "We'll give you a five-hundred-dollar discount. And I promise that if you give us another chance, you won't regret it."

Okay, I said.

With that, the new guy asked the sales manager to take us on a tour of the plant. The first stop was called "the service center." It was a table on which incoming jobs were dumped. "When a guy--and they're all guys--oh, we had a lady once but she quit--is ready for more work he comes to this table and grabs a job." I rolled my eyes. So did the man who had just joined the company. We were both thinking, What, there are no women qualified to type? And wasn't that guy just a little defensive? Followed by Wow, they just pick up whatever job they like? What about priorities? Scheduling? (We know we were both thinking this because we compared notes later.)  

The tour ended and the new guy offered to take us to lunch, to make up for our inconvenience on the job that had gone wrong. The designer and I accepted, and the account rep joined us. We went to a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, the temperature got up to an unseasonable 81 degrees that day, and I was wearing my short-sleeved turquoise belted polyester dress.

We ate and talked, and eventually the designer and the account rep headed for the ladies' room. The guy and I continued to talk, talk, talk. He and his daughter had season tickets to the Children's Theater. I had season tickets to the ballet. He had been at Woodstock. I had beaten Bob Dylan in a talent contest. He'd been a hippie. I'd fancied myself a radical and voted for Eldredge Cleaver for president in 1968.

The designer and account rep finally came back to the table, and it was time to leave. I found out later they were wondering just what was going on between the two of us--the conversation was of no interest to them, and yet we were totally engrossed.

We've been celebrating the anniversary of our first meeting for 25 years now.

Sights and sounds of spring

From the time I was a little girl, I've loved lying in bed in the morning with the window open, taking in the world through my ears. In the past few days I've been hearing the songs of cardinals and mourning doves along with various other chirping and squawking. And neighbor kids going down the sidewalk on roller skates and tiny bicycles with training wheels.

We've had an unusually warm spring thus far. I hope we have a temperate summer, because I hate closing the windows to run air conditioning. But in the spirit of "watch out what you wish for" I hasten to send a message out into the ether-verse that I also don't want to have to wear my winter jacket to the 4th of July baseball game!

This picture was the first photo I took with my first digital camera in 2003. My film camera had broken, and suddenly a family of cardinals was hanging out in our yard. I've never yet gotten a great cardinal photo, but I'm not giving up!