Sun at last and public opinion poll

The sun was bright, the sky was a clean, beautiful blue, leaves and flowers burst open on the limbs of long bare, skeletal trees. In our brains wonderful chemicals were fizzing and goiing snap, crackle and pop and people were unzipping their jackets or taking them entirely off, putting on sunglasses and looking happier ... a little sun after a lot of gray, rainy days is as good as a Souza march or a Strauss waltz, maybe better. So that was today! Hurray!! It will be the weekend the weather pundits announce. Hurray!!
{The sun above is a design by Laurel Birch, a wonderful graphic artist who has designed several versions of cat patterns for quilting fabric. This is a greeting card I"ve been uinable to send anyone because I love the design. Now I can share it with whoever reads this.]

On a darker note -- some left over angst. I've been horrified by the Virgina Tech slaughter; but every morning I am horrified by the numbers of dead in Iraq in the wake of a civil war brought on by the unnecessary, illegal and hateful American invasion. I thought i was the only one feeling this way -- it's hardly a topic of casual conversation. But I was reading METRO a free paper I pick up at the subway stop many mornings. In it was a "man in the street" poll: What do you think of the media coverage of the Virgina Tech event? Two out of three said they felt there is a disparity between the coverage of those deaths and the lack of attention paid to the many, many deaths in Iraq. Iraqi dead are civilians too, often women and children, not combatants, but they are only numbers -- very large numbers. Frankly I was surprised to read those remarks. Perhaps many others besides me are pained every day when we hear/see/read of this senseless slaughter of innocents.