I'm a fan of the early return to Daylight Savings Time. I don't buy the justification for it a bit, chalking it up to another piece of candy that the Bush Administration threw at us to distract us from real issues. ("Let them have daylight!") But having this extra hour of light into the evening is a gift for me, who can't get started before 3:00 p.m. on any given weekend day. All winter it's been a scramble to get the household chores done before sunset.

Today, even with all this extra daytime, the sun has been chasing a swarm of thick black clouds and the hours have come and gone like so many little days and nights. Although it is warmer, it feels colder. To-the-bone cold. When it was bright and cold but windless I could stay warm. The way it seems, cold is heavier than light and falls to the ground. On days like that, the heat gently emanating from the radiators glides up and out the windows, keeping me and the squirrels that sleep on the window ledges toasty. But a windy day suspends the cold and it gusts right through the old windows. The brittle frames of the sashes cling feebly to the glass, which is cracked in places, and thump back and forth in the casements.

The cello went all out of tune in the extreme shifts in temperature and humidity. The strings were slack and rattled. It was sad to pluck them like that. They're in tune again now—chipper, and the sound round.

Taxes tonight. Well, a stab at them. They're simple enough, but my employer botched the HSA on the W-2. Rather than reissuing the W-2, our HR dept. instructed us to enter the figure manually. Not surprisingly, this doesn't work as elegantly as you might expect with Turbo Tax. But the part that sucks is that our HSA is held by a small-timey bank that doesn't have 24-hour access or instant sign-up on its Web site. To recreate the number that should appear on the W-2, I need the year-end statement for that account, the statement I happened to shred after I looked at it because I expected to get actual tax forms later. GAH! So now I have to try to remember to call the bank during business hours, aka the lobotomized hours, to get the info.

Anyway, the expected refund will cover the trip to Germany and Austria.