This weekend is supposed to be warm and bright, and it can’t come soon enough. The snow melted off in yesterday’s balmy weather, revealing piles of dead leaves I still have yet to rake. I’ve been ignoring the yard since last fall, and the bill has finally come due; doing some basement straightening last weekend, I found an entire box of yard waste bags just waiting to be used. I think we will also have to get Her Highness outside for an afternoon in the yard—maybe while we clean up the garden? I predict the fresh air will do us all good.

In other news, I traded some time with a long-time client for a used but shiny G4 tower that was sitting in their old production room, unused and unloved. After a five-minute drive swap last night, it replaced the ancient G3 tower we’ve been using as our music server, and now paves the way for future data storage. (The 11-year-old G3 BIOS doesn’t recognize drives over 120Gb in size, which sucks when I’ve got two 250GB drives sitting idle and in an age when terrabyte-sized drives sell for less than $100).

Finally, I’ve been obsessing over getting out into the garage and working on the Scout. I’m going to do some test runs with the wire wheel on some of the spare parts I got last weekend, vacuum the floors and bed, and take stock of what I’m working with a little better. My plan is to run up the engine for a while until the leak appears, then try to determine where it’s coming from. If it’s just the gasket, that should be easy to order and replace. If not, I’ll lay hands on a used a water pump in the next week and swap that out instead.