Finally - a day of utter delight. Weatherwise, that is.

Not too bad in other respects as well. Husband went singing in the morning, and when he came home just before noon we had a peanut butter and honey sandwich (a treat for him) and then journeyed to Penticton to do some errands and buy, amongst other things, some ink for the voracious printer that is a real glutton for cyan and magenta.

A window snap of the hills on the East Side of Skaha Lake, taken as we made it down the last hill into the city. The sun shone on the rocky outcroppings, and brought them into strong relief. I spied forsythia in bloom and wonderfully coloured trees and shrubs along the roadway, just a-bursting with spring sap and vivid vitality.

Now, in the evening, I am looking forward to the nightly game of cards with the Beloved, and then a little read before sleep comes.

I have been re-reading some Alexander McCall Smith, and am up to about chapter four of Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. On this second (slower) reading I am finding new words that I bypassed before, and ideas and comments that catch my attention and start me nodding in agreement.

"Eleemosynary" - compassion, mercy, charity - without expecting compensation.....how ideal, but such a strange word to describe the act.

And a little discussion of good and evil and the relative ease with which goodness and good people or evil, and evil people can sound interesting. "Yet the good were worthy of note, of course, because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair."

Would that this were recognized in this era of evil's dark glamour, - or has it always been so ?

I do like Isabel Dalhousie, the philosopher/editor in McCall Smith's series "The Sunday Philosophers' Club". She is a lady of many qualities - logic, coolness, curiosity, thoughtfulness, awareness, and a certain boldness tempered with ethical elegance.

I nod in agreement when she describes the id as a "rough, un-house-trained, shadowy thing, wanting to do all those anarchic deeds that the ego and super-ego frowned upon............the bundle of urges and wants that went with being a physical being: the need for food, the need to reproduce - those two alone were enough to cause any amount of difficulty, and indeed were at the bottom of most disputes between people. Arguments over space, food, and sex: id business. This is what humanity's conflicts were eventually reduced to."

Wise words, - I hope that Alexander McCall Smith has many more books to be read and re-read, and that my years stretch out to keep pace with his writings.