I am the busiest unemployed person I know. This is all the blog I have time for today.

New news: Our older son has accepted a job with Google in Mountain View. He is hoping to live in SF and ride the Google bus to work, where he will also receive three free meals a day. He may crash with us for a while until he gets it all sorted.

Known news: Our younger son is having his senior recital on St. Patrick’s Day, and we are helping to prepare by editing (me) and formatting (my husband) his program. It includes quite detailed program notes, containing terms new to me, such as opera seria and through-composed. For those, I just checked the spelling.

Travel news: This past weekend, the boys met me in Houston where we visited my mother on her 79th birthday weekend. The boys arrived from Missouri and California, an audition and an interview respectively. Houston was having uncharacteristically fantastic weather: think zephyr.

Utah news: The reopening of vast quantities of Utah monument lands to intrepid pioneers on February 2nd seems not to have led to a rush of claims. When I first read that new land would be available to anyone willing to set up a few corner posts, fill in some paperwork, and pay $212, all per an 1872 law, I figured lots of people would be eager to own a canyon or two, yet not one claim has been submitted. Even the extraction industries are leaving the area’s uranium, coal, and shale oil in place. Apparently these claims were also legal between 1872 and 2016, and there were no takers then, either.

Moon news: A Berlin-based team is planning to send Audi Quattro rovers to the moon in 2019 in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The rovers will communicate with each other and Earth via a custom 4G network created by Vodaphone Germany and Nokia. I guess we’ll have to stop thinking about the moon as a nearly-barren rock when it becomes a high-tech branding mecca beaming HD video through the cosmos.

Let’s hope the Dark Forest theory of the universe is not correct.