It was a warm day outside my door this sunny Sunday.   I cleaned the screened-in back porch today.  My dear wife, Carrie, was at a play with some of her friends and I decided to roll up my sleeves and get the porch back to being presentable again.  It was fraught with leaves that managed to get in somehow.  Along with a considerable amount of topsoil that came in with some snow that was sifted through by a strong west wind.

I like this porch.  I featured it on a few other posts on the site last year.

We have a sign that steals from the slogan that…perhaps is copyrighted… and goes “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”.  Our sign says “What happens on the Porch stays on the Porch”.  It doesn’t really.  A great deal of my speakingtherights has come from this very chair at this very table.  It is a good spot to think.

I was asked recently if I was ever going to get my interview with Gordy Marshall, a drumming virtuoso, who plays with The Moody Blues…and has since 1991.  Gordy and I have been back and forth.  I am waiting on him to make the next move.  He must be a busy man.  If you have ever seen him play the drums, you would not forget it.  If you ever read some of his prose, you would not forget it.  He is very talented.

A couple nights ago we hosted some friends for dinner and good old fashioned fellowship.  There were stories told and laughter abound.  The food was not a grand ordeal.  I picked up pizza on the way home from work.

In the house were our friends from New Hampshire, Bob and Michelle and their young’uns, Davis, Sabra, and Siera.  Bob’s grandmother passed away last week at the age of 102.  She was laid to rest on her 103rd birthday.  Wow.

Also in the house were Tim and Michelle.  They live just down the road a piece in the neighboring county.  That is a bit shameful, given that we don’t get together as often as we should.  How many of us can relate to that?

Note:  When I say they live in the neighboring county I am talking about ten miles or more in that county.  I can see that same county across the river from where I am sitting on my back porch right now.  Just in case you were wondering.

Finally there will be basketball on television I am very interested in.  I don’t watch college basketball much.  I might sit in on a  bit of a game until I become unaccountable with it and find something else to do.  I have yet to watch a basketball game from tip off to final buzzer this season.  And since Dr, J, Julius Erving, no longer plays in the NBA, I don’t watch that either.  I do…however…have a positive affection for that thing they call March Madness.  It is a bit of Madness.  There are teams that make this tourney that have no more business being there than an Indiana Hoosier Football team that is 6-6…if they ever get there…has going to a bowl game.  I still enjoy it and I watch it with vigor.  I have said it before, I watch enough football for all of us and I give my eyes a break in the wintertime and most of the spring.

Who is going to beat the Kentucky Wildcats?  I doubt anyone does.  I will be filling in one bracket of the teams and the games and pick my winner.  I have to pick UK, I suppose.  They are that good.  I’m not a fan of them, mind you.  But I do have a father-in-law and a sister-in-law and another dear friend that root for their Cats.  I hope they are happy.  I think they will be.

Of course there are folks north of the Ohio River in Indiana that don’t want UK to go undefeated because the last team to do that was an Indiana Hoosier team coached by Bob Knight in the mid-70s.  Forget that argument.  IU and Bob Knight are no longer friends.  I say 40 years later that it is time to move on.

Speaking the rights.

Danny Johnson