We, as a city, exhaled fully these last few days, dropping our cramped shoulders down from our ears. The sun came and cured us of most of our bad moods, our tedious confinement and our frighteningly luminous flesh. Someone told me there were 25 days of rain in Portland this March. It felt like it. But now, I'm sitting in a tank top and shorts writing this beneath a picture of this year's first flowers, carried home in my bike basket. If it didn't interfere with my cargo capacity I would carry potted flowers around on my bike all the time. You should know this about me...for a misanthropic hermit, I am inordinately delighted and soothed by the presence of brightly colored petals. I am also notoriously bad with plants. More on this conundrum to come...