Good morning or good evening, wherever you may be, across the nation  and across the world. It is just past 4:00 a.m. in "The City."

No need to spend much time on the weather this morning. We have a current temperature of 41° that feels like 35° due to the 10 mph winds. Today's high is forecast to reach 55° under cloudy-skies this morning and with sunny-skies this afternoon. The sun will rise @ 6:56 a.m. and set later @ 8:31 p.m. In addition, the NWS has extended the Small Craft Advisory until 8:00 a.m. on Saturday. Four to six foot waves will be driven by 30 knot winds. As always, the "Big Lake" is angry in the spring and inexperienced sailors, small craft, and any vessel without instruments are strongly cautioned to stay off the water.

We had two train runs yesterday. The morning run on the RSTL occurred @ 9:38 a.m. and consisted of MMRR locomotive #2025 towing 11 CHCs and five DBTCs. Later, @ 2:15 p.m., while I was busy in the kitchen, my apprentice 1st class train-spotter, Mary, assisted by Ginger and recorded that the northbound run of that same locomotive passed by with three CHCs and one DBTC in tow.

I said I was busy in the kitchen because I was sauteing some sweet peppers and onions for storage and chopping vegetables for vegan Irish stew. I say Irish stew, because the addition of a full can of Guinness stout beer, brewed in Ireland, is one of the main ingredients. I say vegan, because there was no meat nor dairy products used in the recipe. Yes Virginia, no animals were harmed in the preparation of this recipe.

This stew is one of my favorites and has been memorialized in Mary's handcrafted cookbook. The stew was accompanied by slices of Mary's homemade bread with garlic and nutritional yeast on buttered bread, baked just right. Of course, I couldn't have stew without horseradish.

After I was done in the kitchen, I went upstairs to play with the girls and do some drawing, Mary decided to go walkabout to drop off a package at the UPS store, stop by the bank, tried to get, but failed, in her quest for frozen broccoli @ Health Hutt™ and stopped  in for an adult beverage and to try to save someone's finger @ JWs. And I thought I was busy.

Mary has seemingly reacquired her love of pleasure reading too. I think that much like when I was teaching and I didn't have a desire to read for pleasure, Mary's business of indexing books took away some of her love of pleasure reading that she'd always had. Just an opinion, and I'm sticking to it. Plus, rather than watching TV news, she has taken to listening to mood-music while she reads.

Oh, the 8 - 9. 4th place in the NL Central Cubs, and my beloved, 6 - 13, 5th/last place in the AL East Red Sox, return to action today/tonight, while yesterday, the 9 - 9, 3rd place in the AL Central Tigers defeated that other team from Chicago in an afternoon game, 9 - 7. Sadly, that other team is 7 - 9 and in 4th place in that same division and thus they are not a true measure of the Tigers' abilities. That's in spite of the nine runs scored by the good guys in a rare day game. The Tigers return to night games @ Comerica Park tonight @ 7:10 p.m. when RHP Jordan Zimmermann tries for his first win.

The Caps and the TinCaps were postponed last night due to the inclement weather. They try again tonight @ 5:05 p.m. in South Bend.

Today, nothing is on tap and that's fine with me. I have music to play, drawing to practice, and the newspaper and a book to read. Ciao.