It's finished -- over and out, done, ready to turn in tomorrow night: a 15-page paper on St. Peter's Dome, complete with 60-plus footnotes, a 2-page bibliography, and 14 images. The monstrosity that has dominated my life for weeks and weeks is behind me, and I'm off for a walk to enjoy springtime without the weight of that particular item monopolizing my "To Do" list.

This morning I also ran errands and managed to purchase a short term health insurance policy for one of my college sons, who announced last week that he plans to drop a course, which will relegate him to part-time student status for the remainder of the quarter. "Not so fast," I ordered, before going off to investigate and discovering that, sure enough, immediately upon his dropping said class, both our medical and dental insurance would consider him ineligible for coverage until he is a fulltime student once again next fall. (Not that one should assume that any such thing will happen... .). I could go into a long rant about the state of health insurance in this country and our President's misplaced obsession with Social Security, which might be better directed at the REAL funding crisis we face, the one for medical care for individuals not umbillically attached to a large corporate employer, but I've been muttering about that all week-end. So I'll spare you.

It's SPRING out there. A cold, damp, and cloudy but nevertheless post-equinox day. Things can only be looking up.