i am way too proud of this

That is my fantasy baseball draft list of best possible players (bats on the left, arms on the right). Of the 312 total players drafted Sunday night (there were 26 positions to fill for each of 12 teams), I managed to draft all but *one* from my 180 best players list, which was based on league specifications, last year's stats, and plenty of Baseball Prospectus input. Yay, stats!

i built a garden this saturday past

The veggie garden is finished. It currently has yellow peppers and two types of tomatoes, but that will change soon.

While I wanted to build it in the backyard near the kitchen, there just wasn't enough sun. So I took a cue from many of our neighbors and built it in the front yard next to the driveway. tw wasn't too thrilled with this, but you can't argue with a neighborhood full of old-growth trees. It's also gotten us into new conversations with other front-yard gardeners on the street. There have been numerous discussions about planting techniques and plans to swap some plants soon to increase everyone's variety. I love gardeners -- such a friendly bunch. I built this bed closer to the house than the street so if the time comes to expand, there'll be room (foreshadowing, anyone?) I can probably fit another one and a half beds in, if I *had* to.

But that's not all that's going on in the yard. Spring is showing itself everywhere.

The mini roses are blooming and my grandmother's night-blooming orchid has tons of new growth. I added a trellis and pink mandevilla in the planter bed attached to the house. And the real sign that summer is coming soon: the banana plants have shown signs of life! We have grand plans to move these to the fence line this summer and build a deck by the kitchen.

Hopefully, our next front-yard task will involve ripping out the overgrown azalea bushes and planting something smaller and more manageable -- tea olive bushes, maybe? That, and trying to control the dollarweed that's taken over the front lawn. A true gardener's work is never really finished, is it?

organizing writers

Even though the African grant I was working on was submitted early last week, I've still been MIA. I apologize. I've moved from relief efforts to disaster planning.

I've been expanding my company lately, no longer just editing writers' works but now formatting them too. I have to say I am *loving* what is essentially the organization of the written word. There is something about the beauty of style and design, even in the most mundane of things.

My latest client is working on a comprehensive disaster plan for a regional government agency. All the plans were written by different people, so I was tasked with bringing a unity to the overall design. And since many people are not adept at using Word (although it's practically universal, it sure is a quirky program), it's taken a ton of time. Thankfully, unifying is satisfying work.

When in the formatting zone, I barely read what the words on the screen say. But every now and again, things pop up that make you go "oh!' One of the tables I was working on detailed the number of corpses able to be housed by different agencies in case of a disaster, which included surprisingly lower numbers than one would expect. A bizarre statistic I'll never forget.

Have I told you all lately how much I love my job?