Every day, a new toy to devour my time.

Much of the night, I was playing about with Google Sets, which is both fascinating and useful. Enter up to five things in the search boxes, and the engine will attempt to expand your list with related items. Each name in the list is a link to a google search on that name. Obviously very useful in expanding your knowledge of a subject.

But, this would also be great at those times when you can't quite remember the name of someone famous, but you know the names of several other people in the same field. Enter their names in the boxes, and there is a good chance that the person you're trying to remember will pop up on the list.

Google comes up with so much neat stuff! I wish I had more time to play with it all.

Afternoon Walk.

In mid afternoon, the shadows of the tops of the pines fall on the north-south streets. They remind me of Asian calligraphy. I walk through these shadows, past the flamboyant rhododendron and oleander blossoms that mark the early weeks of summer, past the glittering fountains of lawn sprinklers, past the yard with the garage sale and the yard with children playing some inexplicable game of their own devising, down to the end of the last street along the canyon.

There, where a thick growth of brush and trees was removed to make room for a new house, I can look over the roof of the completed garage and catch a glimpse of the distant ridges of the Sierra, beyond the canyon where Oroville Lake lies. Among the thick treetops that here lie lower than my line of sight, I hear the songs of those birds that never come to my more densely settled street. The day is hot, but the songs are surprisingly cooling. The view from this spot is all green forest and cloudless blue sky, but the songs are like colors for the ears.

In the distance, I see a black speck in the sky. It is a circling hawk. Though the birds nearby are singing all the while, I cease to hear them. My thoughts are with the hawk, and the hawk is silent. It flies lower, and vanishes into the canyon for a moment, then rises again and flies away behind the ridge to the south. It carries the silence with it. After a moment, I turn from the song filled canyon and head home through the calligraphed streets of the everyday world. I see no more hawks.