Science City.

Went to three places today and ended up with a pretty outstanding Springfield Instruments rain gauge, available here from some place excellently named Science City, but available also at your local large orange home improvement warehouse. It is an instrument, I suppose, in much the same way that a pencil is a form of technology in the classroom. But it is an instrument nonetheless. Now I just have to choose a location. No post-mounting for me. In the ground and in the garden. But where? Which one? The crack ANYLF staff is researching the benefits of various locations even as we speak. I've directed them to have a report on my desk in the morning: rain's forecast for tomorrow afternoon or evening, and I need not go on at too much length about how upsetting it would be to have it rain, and to have a rain gauge, but not to have it out gauging.

The Little Baby Jesus has arrived in the plastic light-up nativity scene down the block, though the green wise man continues his sad exile around the side of the house. LBJ is a small plastic light-up Caucasian infant, and is in what looks like either a log holder or a magazine rack. I'm pretty sure that all of this is exactly as it appears in my King James Version up there on the shelf, so no need to check.

We're in that sort of blank placeholding winter now: In the upper fifties, a kind of damp chill on everything, but not warm, not windy, not cold. Showers and rain forecast at least twice between now and Monday. The crows are coming back from wherever it is they've been all day, are roosting, if crows roost, in the tops of the pine trees. Big black silhouettes against a washed-out afternoon sky. The Chinese Firs are throwing off more and more twigs and sticks and branches. It seems like they're putting a lot more down on the ground this year than in years past. I've got them clocked as thirsty. But our weather pattern may be shifting. The pansies are greening up. The lawns are greening a little bit. I've bought a rain gauge. I'll count that as an act of prayer. There's a church on every corner in Science City, and out front of each, LBJ snoozes away in his basket, on his cinder block, up on a pallet of old newspapers. Most of the wise men look on. The others are off to the side, checking their rain gauges, seeing how much it rained.