Today is Camera Girl’s birthday. But being a woman, she doesn’t want to play up the whole getting older thing. So, we call it St. Patrick’s Day and celebrate by having corned beef and cabbage. But since boiled corned beef and cabbage is kind of blah, she makes it her own way. It’s kind of Italian corned beef and cabbage. The meat and potatoes are roasted and the cabbage is sauteed separately in olive oil with minced garlic and seasonings. It’s really quite good that way. This was also the day that the mallards returned to the puddle.
And the last of the great southern glacier melted away and left the great southern mud field.
I also used the warmer weather as an excuse to cut down all the raspberry canes in our garden.
This was a controversial act because depending upon whether we have summer or fall plants we will or won’t get any berries this year. Apparently, summer berries take two years to produce berries while fall berries are one year berry producers. If we have the two-year type then cutting all the canes means we’ll get nothing this year. This will make me decidedly unpopular with Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes because they are big fans of this fruit. But a man’s got to do, what a man’s got to do. I was at an impasse. I couldn’t tell what we had and figured solving it once and for all was the way to go. May the Lord have mercy on my soul. Well anyway, I’ll put out a bunch of fertilizer and try to maximize the growth we get this year.
Camera Girl was out feeding Moe the Crow and his wife Flo the Crow when she noticed that a large raptor was in one of the trees over the puddle. After being alerted I sprang into action and captured some poor-quality photos through the balcony door window and a lot of intervening branches. I think it’s a black vulture. So now carrion birds are joining the menagerie. Only in Dunwich.
Well things are moving forward and spring is in high gear. We had a bunch of rain and so far, the Compound seems to have escaped any major winter structural damage. And considering how much more and higher speed wind we’ve had in the last three or four years that’s encouraging. This winter there have been nights when sitting in the living room and listening to the wind howling like some combination of a freight train and a banshee has been a little discouraging. I mean I hate to be one of those old guys who claims that things were so much better when I was a youngster but honest to goodness, I think with the wind it must be objectively true. And as a climate change denier this is inconvenient. Although it’s as likely for the climate to be warming or cooling without the help of anthropogenic factors to blame. So, it is nice that we can start to emerge from our winter cocoon and begin to enjoy the outside world again.
And so, slightly ahead of the calendar I hereby declare that Dunwich Spring has sprung.
Spring is returning to S. Carolina as well. We have two dozen Canada Geese on the Creek Pond. Two pair that have claimed the west branch, and twenty in the main body. There seem to be several mated pairs already looking for nesting spots. Cardinals, mocking Birds and Grackles are calling for mates, and the Testudos are coming out to sun bathe on the pond banks. We have one little guy, the size of a pet shop turtle, who likes to climb a small pointed rock and stand on the tip like Gammera on Mt. Fuji!
In his mind he’s the lord of all creation. But he’d better hope a crane or heron doesn’t come along and snap him up.