I can tell

It's starting. I can feel the days getting longer. Not so much in the morning, but in the evening, especially when the sky is clear, there is definitely more light. Last night it was still kind of light out at six o'clock.

The metal stakes in the new vineyard parcel line up exactly with those in the older parcel in the foreground.

We watched a documentary on television last night. It was one in a series about deserts, and the desert of the evening was the Mojave in the southwestern United States. Now, I usually have the highest praise for French documentaries. They're thoughtful, informative, well photographed, and not sensationalistic. In other words, boring. I like them like that. But whenever the French do a program that involves people in the United States or Canada, they seem to have a knack for finding the crazies. I looked up the program we saw last night and learned that it was actually produced by a German company. The Germans apparently share France's talent for seeking out and interviewing the loonies in America.

In the Mojave desert, the filmmakers interviewed an old geezer who's life work has been to build a humungous gaudily painted rock sculpture dedicated to Jesus. Another woman told us she is a contractor at the airport where Virgin Galactic and other companies are trying to develop space flight vehicles. She loves her job because, through her, God is helping man get into space so he can be closer to heaven. A woman who once lived on an abandoned western-themed movie set told of the old German man who was holed up in, well, a hole under a rock. He frequently encountered visitors from other worlds, especially those from Venus, who taught him the secret to cell regeneration and eternal youth. He's dead now, she thinks. Then there was the woman, extremely pregnant, who recounted her close encounter with an alien in a white pickup truck. She never said who the father of her child might be, but I was expecting, well, you know.

That's when we changed the channel.