Unemployment, New Claims -- 351,000

The magic number is 400,000. Anything below 400,000 is considered "good news."

351,000 is back to "four-year lows."

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 351,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That took claims back to a four-year low reached in February.

 I see the market opened flat, to negative. Impressed?

Note to the Granddaughters

During the month of March, the granddaughters have early release from school on Wednesdays due to parent-teacher conferences. We had looked forward for quite some time to go birding at Mt Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge on one of those Wednesdays. Yesterday we went.

Mt Auburn Cemetery, consecrated in 1831, was the nation's first landscaped cemeteries. Prior to this one, most cemeteries were small plots of land inside city limits, usually next to, near, or on church grounds. Mt Auburn was entirely different. It's a park with memorials to entire families.

Visitors are welcome; at the chapel there is a small visitor's center where one can buy an $8 pamphlet on birding at the cemetery.

It turned out to be a cooler day than expected and the birds were huddled out of sight. We did see a flock of robins, maybe a cedar waxwing (according to my 8-year-old granddaughter) and a red-tailed hawk. I knew it was a hawk, but did not know what kind. The 8-year-old did; she says another red-tailed hawk spends a lot of time near her school, so I guess she would know.

So, we will go back again, on a nicer day to go birding.

But this was the big surprise. All the trees (ok, not all the trees, but the most I have seen in one place) in the cemetery have little plaques on them with their names and some background information. It was incredible: by the end of the day, we were identifying oak trees, sugar maple trees, magnolia trees, dogwood, fir, spruce, cedar, elm, walnut by the bark only because the leaves had not come out yet (of course, we quickly separated the trees with needles from those without). A new one for both of us was the incredible Kentucky coffee tree.

So, now, our next task is to figure out the taxonomy of trees. It turns out that the taxonomy of trees, at least for me, is more difficult than that for animals.

I can never remember the taxonomy levels of classification, so my granddaughter, an avid Brownie, and I came up with "King Philip carried off funny girl scouts" for kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

Well, it turns out the classification for plants replaces "division" for "phylum." If I knew that at one time, I had forgotten, but I don't think I knew that. Hmmm.

Anyway, when I told my granddaughter that at breakfast this a.m. she immediately, without missing a beat, said, "King David carries off funny girl scouts. And King David was a real king."

I was impressed.

After two hours identifying trees and looking for birds, we walked to Harvard Square, walking down Brattle Street. The home was closed for the season, but the gardens were open, to the William Wadsworth Longfellow home on Brattle street about a half-mile from Harvard Square. This smallish McMansion was the headquarters for George Washingon, 1775 - 1776. Incredible. I never knew it was there, and I never knew General Washington had headquarters so close to where we walk so often.

This is getting long, so I will just say we had the most wonderful hot chocolate and chocolate-lemon cake at L. A. Burdick, Homemade Chocolates, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sublime.