Timely Snow

this is a neat site - http://factorytoursusa.com/.

Putting our compost pile as close to the house as we did may turn out to have been a big mistake.

How to Learn Chinese in 2,200 Not-So-Easy Lessons
Courtesy of Chris Correa, this article by a Washington Post staff writer on the difficulty of learning Chinese. He was lucky, I suspect, in having as his instructor the daughter of the most famous modern Chinese linguist (who, I believe, wrote the tongue-twisting poem he cites). That poem [...]

For about the last year and a half, I’ve tried to run my life from a laptop (a very nice one, too– an IBM Thinkpad T41 with a big screen (1500 x 1200) for a laptop and a very nice keyboard. It worked well during that transitional time — it’s been to Europe twice, to China three times, and accompanied me on the big move from Champaign to Ann Arbor. It lost a few keys along the way, victim of a box I was packing for the move, but it’s served me well. But laptops are still compromises and the costs of that compromise became more evident as time has gone on.

The Ann Arbor District Library (www.aadl.org) is