The For Rent sign is up in the window of the commercial space although we still have floors to do. Some people have come into the room and asked if there was always a tin ceiling. Some patching and a shiny enamel paint job brought it to life. A busy weekend. Friday night to Camden for dinner and Kate & Anna McGarrigle at the Camden Opera House. I've been a fan for 25 years and it was just delicious to see them in this beautiful small venue. They opened with the swimming song and closed with Mendicino and alternated French and English songs in between. Best was their French version of the Malvina Reynolds Ticky Tacky Houses song. Planning ahead musically, Dar Williams and Catie Curtis will perform at the Saltwater Festival in August at Thomas Point Beach, site of the now defunct Maine Festival. Reading: Steven Johnson's Emergence. How micro-behavior by beings with simple programs and no knowledge of the whole, create complex super organisms. The interactions of the simple beings with each other are examples of network behavior. Why networks and emergence are related. On the reading machine (stepper next to a music stand) I read magazines and let the postcard things that fall out of them pile up around me like fallen leaves. I liked this Next Testament article in Harper's about modern analogues for parts of the bible (you know, the old testicle and the new), Darwin and Stephen Hawking for Genesis, a book of Martin and book of Rachel in the new testament. You probably have a mental list of your personal scriptures, those writings that have formed your world view and that you've read several times. Mine includes James Carse, Annie Dillard, Wallace Stevens. Mostly shallow with a few deep spots. I'll start a list. One of the chief uses of my Palm thingy (currently a Tungsten E) is to keep lists. Having something to fiddle with in the middle of a meeting is another key use. I can check a list or two or look at a few photos. The killer app for the PDA and the only reason I actually need one is Cloak, an encryption utility that lets me store my gazillion usernames and passwords in a 128-bit encrypted file, and means I only have to remember the Cloak password. Our friends Pam and Bob had never been sugar-shacking, and so today, Maine Maple Sunday (sugar shack day), we put them in the back seat of Iko, the adventure mobile, and visited four maple operations. The "sugarbush" is a hill with a lot of sugar maples on it. The sap drips into IV tubing which connects to larger plastic piping, all of which flows downhill into a holding tank in the sugar shack. The old hang the bucket on the tree method is still used most places. The holding tank feeds into an evaporator where 40 gallons of sap becomes one gallon of maple syrup. Two operations were using reverse osmosis (Pam, a chemist, is handy to have along for these explanations) to remove some water first so that only 8 gallons of sap are needed for a gallon of syrup. Did I mention that eating is a part of the tour? Pancakes, maple walnut ice cream, maple taffy. And breathing the warm, sweet steam inside the shack. Bright brisk sunshine outside, warm sweet inside. Inside the big evaporator at Strawberry Hill it was The Molten Planet. A vivid dream the other night had Chase's Toys, a snowmobile/jetski rental place here, renting surfbikes. I can't find any surfbike rentals nearby and what would do as well is an efficient paddle boat. I went looking for such things and found these Human Powered Boats but nothing rentable. Then I found this waterbike. Goes for about $900 and will get up to 6 mph. Things to think about with the lake still frozen. I hope to try out one this summer.

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