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1. Went for a 10+ mile bike ride with Kylie this afternoon. Not a long ride, but I no longer have to apologize for not being hard-core. I mean, I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, ferchristsake. It was fun until her face froze and fell off.

2. Got to the barn late, as the group was already tacked up and leaving on a trail ride. I brushed out Cheyenne as quickly as possible (I use a shedding comb year-round on that boy - cuts through dried mud like anything), and caught up to them just as they were starting back. On the way out, he was fairly tentative, and seemed a bit tender-footed. I think he's just not used to the hard ground. But on the way back, he was paying more attention to the other horses (he was last, since we arrived last), and was right on their collective tail regardless of the gait or speed.

3. I just did my first official Christmas Shoping of the season. Mind, it was for a couple of blokes I'd never met before this June. And it was incredibly obvious - the Resource Revival bottle opener and the Fat Tire beer glass. Fat Tire being, of course, the most sublime beer on the face of the earth. Alas, it's only available as far east as Missouri. And of course, Andy is a Brit and will drink anything, and Dan prefers Corona above all else. But this will remind them of the many fine beers we shared last summer.

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Wednesday is World Toilet Day.

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The landscaping crew outside is vacuuming/shredding the leaves that they spent most of last week blowing around. It's making a god-awful amount of both noise and dust, past my third-floor office window.

So much energy and physical labor is devoted to trying to avoid simple physical labor like raking leaves. In Poland a couple years ago, I watched a grounds crew raking grass clippings. That just Wouldn't Happen here. But I didn't know the Polish for "What, have you never heard of a bagging mower?", so I just watched, slightly agape. I should be more agape at the leaf vac truck, but I'm inured to it.

(Yes, I'm bored at work, why do you ask?)

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Okay, confession time.

I'm addicted to the Soham murder trial. I don't normally follow court cases, and, while I'm reasonably informed, I don't follow any individual news story this closely. Maybe it's just that this one is too close to comfortably ignore.

The short facts are this: two 10-year-old girls disappeared near their homes in a small town in England. Their bodies were found in a ditch on a country lane two weeks later, coincidentally on the same day a school caretaker and his girlfriend were arrested on suspicion. The evidence is largely circumstantial, but comprehensive and damning. I don't doubt that he did it, but I still want to know why he did it, how he did it, what on earth he was thinking. I hang on every detail of the case, because this is every parent's worst nightmare.

One tangential thing that struck me about this case is that some of the more important evidence is mobile phone records, and closed-circuit television records. The telephone logs were willingly (and correctly) handed over by BT, and CCTV seems to have made its way into every British town common. They truly live in a fish-bowl society, much more than we do, and the technology I'm working on helps enable that.

The other thing I noticed is the seeming prevalence of child abductions in Britain. I don't know if it's over-reported there, under-reported here, or just skewed by the fact that I get my news from the BBC. Possibly if I read cnn.com (gack), or watched CNN (double gack), I'd know more about the evil that Americans are capable of. But I don't want to. This is bad enough.