1) I attended a puppet show performance of John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River.
2) I saw my first butterflies of the year.
3) I picked up used copies of V.S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and Balzac’s Pere Goriot.
4) I saw a red-winged blackbird singing in the boughs of a mustard plant near the edge of San Francisco Bay; that verse in the New Testament about birds nesting in mustard plants had always seemed so unlikely, but then I’d never seen mustard eight feet tall before.
5) I made the acquaintance of a lovely young woman whose father was a UFO chaser and once took the family on a camping trip to Mt Shasta after being informed by a Ouija board that a flotilla of saucers had scheduled a meet-up there.
6) I held my breath for three minutes and ten seconds (a personal best).
7) I visited an Egyptology museum operated by the Rosicrucians and with my four-year-old daughter in my arms considered the wrapped-up mummy of a four-year-old girl who died three thousand years ago.
