Perspicacious readers,

I often take an hour for fiction drafting on Thursday mornings, but I have some beginning of April news that was too earnest for yesterday, so I'm sneaking in a letter to you instead.

First, a poem! My poem "Leaning on the Melting Point" will be up all month outside Spun, my local knitting store. I bundled up in suitable knitted items and took a photo with it.

(If you're here for the knitting content, I also bought yarn to make a leafy coat in black and gray, and a book on knitting toy cats.)

If you're in southeast Michigan, you're invited to a party and reading for the PoetTreeTown project. It's tomorrow, Friday, April 3rd, at the Growing Hope Marketplace Hall in Ypsilanti. The party, with pizza to eat and books for sale, starts at 6:30. Readings start at 8 PM--I'm on the schedule near the beginning.

My other beginning of April news is that I have a new column up about a math puzzle from 1600 and a chain of associations that leads to a crater on Venus. For some more math amusement, let me offer you a meditation on what makes a number boring; I discovered yesterday that there's an online tool that will identify the current record for the smallest boring number, as measured by failure to appear in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. The best part of this tool, of course, is that numbers stop being boring on a regular basis.

Here's Kosmas, insisting that cats are never boring:

Yours,

Ursula.