Two days ago, the result of an ice storm of Windigovian proportion, a third of a mature mulberry tree crashed into my driveway. (Another five meters and I'd have lost the garage.) Then the power went out, and stayed out. I suppose it's a good thing I live near several hotels. And I'm holed up in one until the lights -- and the heat -- come back on. Could be a long time.

This is what happens when you're darn near as old as Desert Brush.

For those of you in what Borat called the U. S. and A., have a glorious Thanksgiving, and remember: calories don't count before 6 pm (5 Central). Meanwhile, I will contemplate what awaits me as I start my 63rd trip around the sun.

Well, really, I haven't had much to say of late: things in what I laughingly call Real Life have gotten the better of me of late, and I'm still not entirely sure I've regained control yet.

That said, I'm not ready to go on the cart just now. Whatever that may mean.

This anguished bit of agitprop showed up in, of all places, Yahoo! Answers:

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For five years, I've had to make like Sisyphus pushing that damned un-Tom-like boulder up the steepest slope I could imagine, in an effort to get out from under the heaviest -- well, the most expensive, anyway -- burden I've ever been stupid enough to inflict upon myself.

And it's all over except for the last bang of the gavel. Life still costs too much; but at least I can afford it again.

Okay, things are not as critical in my neck of the woods as they were in Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" ("Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline"), but they're close: we have had more rain this week than in the entire year up to this week. It isn't enough to relieve a long-standing drought, but some of the area reservoirs have recovered from Alarmingly Low to merely Low. I need hardly point out that flood-control measures are occupying most of my sparse free time; in fact, nearly a

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One interesting occurrence this week: a reader came through, slogged through all four of the TwiBrush Tales, upthumbed the lot, and left a comment on the first of them to the effect that the purely arbitrary calendar which I had conjured up didn't make a great deal of sense to him.

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"So what's been keeping you away?" Twilight Sparkle demanded.

"This," I said, holding up a halfway-completed Form 1040.

A burst of magic snatched the paper from my hand, turned it over, returned it to me upside down. "It takes seventy-nine lines for a simple income-tax return?"

"You haven't seen Schedule A yet," I retorted. "And I can't finish this form until I do that one."

"And I thought Equestrian taxes were absurd," said Twilight.

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Just wanted to thank whatever kind soul wandered over here last night and gave me my 7000th story view.

Two words: "cancer screening."

Test results: negative.

For the moment, anyway. I still feel like crud warmed over, and not especially warm at that, but hey, I'll take it.