He reneges, he relents, he returns.

It is, after all, a compulsion with me to use a blank space. Not necessarily to fill it, but to frame it, caption it, emboss it, doodle on it, compose on it, decompose it, or otherwise make it my own.

Still, there's a particular wealth of interest in the world outside my computer these days, so regularity will not be a watchword.

But when I have time for a quick flight, I'll be slipping on the goggles and skywriting here.

On with the news...

Everyone seems to still be doing quizzes in blog-land. I'm tired of pre-fab quizzes. So here's the latest on me, in the form of quizzes and answers I invented myself:

What kind of number are you?
Reciprocal
What kind of choral music are you?
Antiphonal
What is your current altitude?
Above 30,000 feet, flying in close formation
What kind of food are you?
An unbaked loaf of bread, still rising
According to the Emotional State Animal Anagram-O-Matic, you are a:
Vole

I'll end with a quote, which I thank hangingfire for introducing me to some years ago.

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden?

Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water -- peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?

And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

-- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping