My dad used to take night walks when I was little, and if the mood struck him, he would buy me an ice cream cone. This didn’t happen very often, and I still remember how that vanilla tasted.

Now I’m still trying to find ways to use up the fatless, sugarless ice cream in my freezer. It is not the idyllic stuff of my childhood. Trying to cram it into a cone is difficult, and the already imperfect edge of the cone shatters even more.

I am guessing the Argentine ants will also reject it.

It’s hard to shop while sneezing and blowing your nose. I stood around at Home Depot wondering, am I insane? Is there a worse place to be with allergies? Well, yes. I spent time cozying up to the pollen-laden shrubs for a couple of hours yesterday. Normally, if I make it through the night without gasping and taking something, I’ll be fine the next day. Not so this time. By 4:30, after enduring five stores, leaving behind a mountain of Kleenex, I gave up, came home, and took half a generic antihistamine.

I have Allegra, but the mood changes I can do without. The generic pill renders me. . . useless for most tasks that. . . require some. . . (yawn) alertness.

Can we be profoundly disturbed by what we can’t hear? Catastrophic occurences such as earthquakes, avalanches, erupting volcanoes, and tsunamis can be preceded by infrasound. When a ’soundless concert’ was held in Liverpool, audience members felt a range of sensations, from a prickly feeling on the back of the neck to anger to joy.

If you were at Cal Day yesterday, and saw two young men playing didgeridoos, those were my boys.

They were paying homage to an earlier Cal Day, when one was still in high school and the other an incoming freshman. Sitting in Sproul Plaza, we were startled to hear deep, unearthly sounds, and traced them to an accomplished didge player, who was not a student, but just there hanging out.

Someone walked by with an armload of exotic-looking flowers at the Mountain View farmers market. She said they would last almost three weeks. After chatting with the vendor, I learned the proteas were grown in Aptos.