Spring has come to California. This week I noticed trees flowering: white blossoms appeared alongside the road near my work-trailers, and a specimen adjacent to the Pizza Hut in my neighborhood is a riot of bright-pink color. This means the Jacaranda trees will start blooming in about a month - I find their lilac-violet hue delightful, and a pleasant component of pre-Summer both up here and down in SoCal. They add a kind of light purple frosting to the scene you observe from the freeway there, in May.

The podiatrist removed my bloody dressings today, and declared that all was normal. He assures me the agony will recede very soon, although complete healing will not occur for six to eight weeks (since the feet are so far from the heart, they take the longest time). As I totter about on my post-op shoes wearing a pinched expression, leaning on the cane T gave me for support, I see this look in people's eyes: their thought balloons I interpret as "Better him than me!" Hobbling along at quarter-speed, I'm thinking never again will I exude irritation when my way's blocked momentarily by some elderly party movin' slow. I'm hoping the pain will be minimal in a week's time, so as to not inhibit my upcoming Vancouver adventure.

Heard Peter Fonda in an interview on Terry Gross' "Fresh Air" program last night. He repeated his big line from "Ulee's Gold", which I'll reproduce here (since I couldn't recall it with precision, it was omitted from my previous discussion): "...there's all kinds of weakness in the world, and not all of it is evil. Sometimes I forget that." He pointed out that he was wearing spurs throughout "Easy Rider" so we'd know it was a Western. Also he said Dennis Hopper wanted his costume to be white leather in that film, but that desire was overruled because they also wanted the S&M crowd's business at the boxoffice (some tongue may have been in cheek with that comment). Other interesting anecdotes he detailed included police harassment while riding his motorcycle around LA in said "Easy Rider" drag, and zooming down Ventura Blvd with Marlon Brando behind him, as passenger (asking about paternal feelings).

I loitered around Tower Books this afternoon scanning Software Runaways by Robert L. Glass, where he describes fourteen disasters of software development. I had to retire to a quiet corner to read the entire chapter on my current project's sort-of predecessor - the FAA's Advanced Automation System (AAS), which went from 1986 to 1994. On my last project I worked with some people who'd just come out of the collapse of AAS - the whole thing was canceled. Billions of the taxpayers' dollars spent for naught. The story, of people giving so much to the project, for nothing, just stiffens my resolve to never work under "death march" conditions - it won't work anyway, the wrong people will be rewarded, and life's too short to be wasted that way.

Häagen-Dazs has let me down. Seems they've redone their Low Fat offerings, replacing Chocolate with Chocolate Brownie Fudge - a serious flaw, since the only "mix-in" I tolerate in that preferred flavor is nuts. <1>