Word is there will be cold rain tomorrow. At least it won’t be snow, and at least it’s the beginning of the end of winter. Today was sunny and above freezing. So cloudless, in fact, that I was inspired to take a picture of the clear blue sky.

I don’t know if I’ve ever taken that kind of picture before. Clouds, yes. Trees in front of a clear sky, yes. But straight up azure? It was surprisingly hard to get the camera to take the shot, I suppose since the sensors don’t sense anything nearby to focus on.

One thing I did over the weekend was thumb through some of my maps. I can’t quite call it a collection, since there’s no system to it, and I haven’t been going out of my way to acquire them over the years. Mainly they’ve been useful purchases, such as in London or Berlin, and they’ve accumulated.

My Vietnamese-language world map, on the other hand, was a souvenir. I’m pretty sure I got it in Saigon. At the top it says it’s a bản đồ thế giới, except it’s all capitals. But it does feature some of the intricate diacritical marks that characterize Vietnamese.

Here’s Vietnam’s neighborhood.

And North America.

In case you need to know it, the United States is Hoa Kỳ in Vietnamese. I’m just guessing, but that seems to be a translation of “united states.” Look at the map enough, though, and you’ll see many of the place names seem to be phonetic.