9 a.m. on a Sunday, and the air is filled with the sound of a bucket loader: beeping in reverse, rumbling forward, beeping, rumbling, beeping, rumbling. Also, the washing machine is growling in the basement, Tom is crashing a frying pan on the stove, and the dog is scratching. Why is it, amid all this sound, that the dog noise is most annoying? I just hate to listen to a dog scratch.

I wish I had something exciting to tell you, but I don't. One boy is asleep; the other is probably asleep also, but he's at his friend's house, where he tells me they plan to spend the day Bondo-ing his car but where I suspect they'll actually spend the day sleeping, cooking and consuming enormous numbers of pancakes, and intermittently watching YouTube videos of strange activities such as "how to dress up in a kangaroo suit and hop destructively through the French countryside." At least that's what they do when they're at my house.

No, I have nothing interesting to share today. I could talk about vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom; I could talk about tearing out frostbitten bean plants; I could tell you about prepping myself for the elementary school's parent-student soccer game; I could tell you about the mouse noises in the wall; I could tell you about my latest woodsplitting defeat. But none of this necessarily seems worthy of transcription. The bucket loader is still beeping and rumbling, and the washing machine is still growling. The dog, however, has stopped scratching, so already the day has improved.