See you soon, Alan.

This handsome dude you see here is Alan, a tree planting pal of three of us bloggers (myself, Krahn, and Capt Goldstar). As of two days ago, sadly, he is no longer among the living.

Al, who was following his dad's footsteps in becoming a maker of custom acoustic guitars, was kind-hearted, generous, and treated everybody around him with respect. And those glowing eulogies you always hear never quite do justice to a life, I feel, so I'll just say that, from what I knew of him in our brief friendship, Alan was a good man. Period.

Interestingly, (and perhaps a bit symbolically, I thought) when I got the facebook msg informing me that he had died in an accident, I was in the middle of setting the time, on a little clock that he had given me to use in my tent this spring.

So long, Al. See you soon.