Doors Open.

The other half of January has landed here on the twelfth day of Xmas, warm and sunny and a little breezy and the temps up into the high fifties/low sixties, so: doors open. And windows. No rain with the front. Now they're saying maybe Tuesday.

The plastic light-up wise men down the street are done for the year, in a heap around the side of the house, the LBJ stacked up on top of them like cordwood. My hawk is back, roosting out on the end of an oak branch fifty or sixty feet off the ground. It's so big that for a second I got excited and thought it might be an eagle, but I think that's just enthusiasm and astigmatism. The damaged kid two blocks over is out in his backyard, singing at the top of his lungs. It might be a kind of bent version of the Star-Spangled Banner. I thought I heard something about rockets. Whatever it was, he was trying it out in a number of different keys.

Out at the far end of the dogwalk, at the turn, the dog got all low and bellied slowly along the ground for about a hundred feet, staring the whole time at this Benji-looking dog named Gideon. Come on, Gideon. Gideon, come on. Gideon's mother, as they passed, and as the dog then did her growl bounce thing, tail up, jumping basically toward Gideon, every piece of fur sticking out, said, You have a very intense dog.

Hammers and saws all up and down the streets. Various projects underway. Last week was the kind that holds the daffodils back a little bit. Today's the kind of day that tugs them back the other way.

I think yesterday's temps might have been average for the day, and I missed it. Maybe that's what an average day is. The kind you don't notice. Our average for this time of year is. We're twelve degrees above average for. Our normal yearly rainfall should be.

No rain. Warmer than normal. You know the words to this song.