Jane really can’t take loud shrill noises. Me, I was lead flute in a marching band and briefly, while our piccolo player was out of commission, I also played piccolo. Stars and Stripes Forever, anyone?
So when it comes to leaf blowers, Jane can’t be around them. But I bought one a year or so ago, to try to help with dry-stuff cleanup. Jane detested my leafblower. But this spring, with deep mulch in a couple of the roses, I got a chance to be useful, by Jane’s own request. Cleared.
Got the plugs inserted in the water cutoffs, which means I have now turned on the outdoor lines so we have working faucets. This will let us drain down the pond a bit and fill it with new water—which will actually be a bit warmer than what’s out there. But Jane’s working today—a good thing: the book must be moving—so I’m just going to wait on that.
The fence—we’re going to bite the bullet and do it: it’s one of those things that will make the house look good, and will remove the worry of having a whole section of the fence go down in a windstorm—that would have happened, except the apple tree is holding that part up and the hawthorne is holding another. So, yes, we need a fence.
And it’s cold out there. Jane and I are both chilled, not by the ambient temperature, but by the dankness of the air, I think.
So, well, maybe the work can wait another day or so.
Southern Arizona is usually beautiful this time of year, but this year with deficient winter rains the wildflowers just aren’t putting on a show. The humidity is very low and the daytime temperatures are running in the low seventies in our area, nighttime temps dropping into the 40s. The breezes (winds) are kicking up pollen and my sinuses are acting up, big time. I’d share the lower humidity and milder temps with you. Between the two of our locations we could probably find something attractive for this first day of spring.
We had sleet over here last night.
The weather is fine, no rain recently, and the back yard needs another bout with The Goat, but I haz teh tummy flu. How many flavors of water are there out there — Gatorade, chicken broth, Jello, mint tea, cran-raspberry…? Right now, a PBJ sounds like high cuisine, if it would only stay put! No, Zorro, please do not try to sit on my stomach, regardless of it it is the sovereign Stomach Cure.
We had rain instead of snow Wednesday night. Proge took the net off the pond yesterday and set up the waterfall filter. The pool still has a solid layer of ice. It’s the difference between in ground and above ground water I guess. I think all the snow has melted….at last! Now we wait for enough warmth to put plants out!
Spring around here is almost a month early. We’ve had an extremely mild winter as regards temperatures, but several heavy storms that did a lot of damage to a lot of trees. Many more than usual are being taken down, and very many have had large branches taken out. Some of that is due to the temperatures rather than the storms: one of the greenery men told me that the warm sunny weather combined with a cold northern wind meant a temperature differential of 20 degrees Centigrade from the frozen north side of the treetrunks to the sunny southern side, and that trees with thin bark couldn’t withstand that. Their sap starts flowing on the south side, while the north is frozen solid, and that means their bark bursts in great long fissures on the south side. So some of those won’t survive and have to be taken down now, before the birds start nesting – which they are doing a lot earlier than usual this year, too.
It seems that keeping the freezing air parked over the USA has saved us from the coldest blasts this winter, we didn’t have any snow that I recall, and very little frost. Even the summer geraniums that I didn’t clear away in autumn have survived outdoors, which is totally unheard of, and the first yellow butterflies are already out.
I wonder how that will work out over the summer, with things like the timing of the first bird’s brood being out when the spring caterpillar flush is at its height. Not all interlinked organisms use the same triggers. Some go by temparature: those are early, this year. Some go by day-length, and those should keep to their usual timing. I think for a lot of things the trigger isn’t known yet, and different bird species have different nesting-triggering mechanisms, but I seem to remember the caterpillars and the little bluetit birds that depend on them for feeding their nestlings were on two different triggers, last time the temperature and daylength got out of whack, which meant a lot of the nestlings starved.