Tag: New England Spring
Ah, That Was a Proper 2026
So today it got up to 66οF and tonight it’s only going to get down to 38οF. Tomorrow I’m off from work and it’s gonna be 67 οF and sunny all day, with no wind. So, tomorrow is the official first day of un-winter. Camera Girl and I will officially get up a half hour later, eat a leisurely breakfast, stroll around the devastated grounds and then go for a ride and walk around a lake, take a few photographs then go into town and have something special for lunch; maybe Chinese or Thai. Life begins again.
Except for the north side of the garage roof, all the roof snow is practically gone. And some areas of vegetation (mangled and brown) have reappeared behind the retreating snow. Obviously, the absurdly high piles of snow I created over the course of the last few weeks will be there well into April (and in places into May) but those will just be there as a cautionary tale about the folly of living in New England.
The west field will be soggy for weeks while the snow retreats there last. But within a week or two I intend to go there and cut down all of the raspberry canes and spread fertilizer on that bed. Last year that program provided a bonanza of berries and I intend to duplicate that procedure this spring. But the truly awful production we got out of the squash, eggplants and cucumbers over there has convinced me to move all of these beds to the south field. I’m going to dig up a good chunk of lawn over there and plant vegetables and transplant some flowers that have languished too close to the forest shade.
So, there is a plan going forward and plenty of work to do. But it’s just so good to finally be freed from sitting around in the house staring out at a world of snow. They talk about cabin fever and I know exactly what they mean. It’s a depressing, nervous state where you have to invent things to do to keep your mind off of your imprisonment. It’s a time when you try to stick to exercise regimens just to avoid becoming a pile of mush over the inactivity of the winter. And the short days just makes it worse because darkness makes you sleepy.
Okay, I’ll put all that behind me. Winter 2025/2026 is officially dead and buried. Even if we have that stupid April Fools’ Day nor’easter this year, it’s just there to provide “poor man’s fertilizer” for the vegetation. I predict 2026 will be a very productive year with interesting scientific and technological news and improvements on the economic front. But most important I predict that summer 2026 will provide the most memorable cookouts, barbecues and grilling that will be talked about for the next decade and will become a byword for successful outdoor parties. Like some Shire gaffer, in the future you’ll see me eating a cheeseburger smothered in onions and relish and here me declare, “Ah, that was a proper 2026!”
Must Be Global Warming Again
I was looking at the Accu-weather forecast for Dunwich. There was a special miasmal ectoplasm alert on for the area (as usual). But the temperature forecast was eye-catching:
Tonight: Clear and bitterly cold. Lo: 4°F
Tomorrow: Mostly sunny and cold; the coldest day until next winter.
That was an interesting statement. Now don’t get me wrong. Hearing that it would get down to 4°F was in no way cheery. Single digits and below is a special part of the “charm” of New England. Camera Girl and I prepare for this by stacking two hundred pounds of blankets on top of ourselves in bed and use snorkels to get air. So, no, I’m not looking forward to tonight. But to hear that from now on until next year it will not be getting horribly cold again is like being someone trapped in a flooded building where the water line is only inches from the ceiling and you’ve been dog paddling for dear life and breathing the last few inches of air for hours praying you wouldn’t drown and finally the tide begins to recede. You experience a sense of relief and victory over a horrible enemy.
It snowed today but I waited until about 2pm and the sun came out and melted the dusting on the driveway. I went around trimming back the ten foot piles of snow along the edge of the driveway just to show them who’s boss and how limited their remaining time would be. I think as I struck with my shovel I taunted the snow in a somewhat insane manner. It’s been a long winter. The other day I was able to get the snowblower working. I poured warm water down the chute and like magic it was completely functional. So, all of the horror from last week was unnecessary. But uncertainty ruled and I didn’t want to use up any time fiddling with the machine when I knew I barely had enough daylight to shovel myself out from a foot of snow.
But all of that is behind me. From now on melting snow will be the reality and preparations will begin for spring. Already we are preparing for the next milestone. St. Patrick’s Day is coming up and Camera Girl will prepare her version of corned beef and cabbage. Lately she hasn’t been boiling it. The cabbage is sauteed and the beef is pan fried but it still connects us with the patron saint of the city of our birth (before Mamdani installed the minarets on St Patrick’s Cathedral). After that Easter is right around the corner and dare I hope some lamb could be on the menu? Camera Girl despises lamb. She prefers ham or pork for Easter but every once in a while, she’ll provide a lamb alternative for lepers such as myself who enjoy a little flavor at Easter.
But all of this is premature. Tonight, I’ll add another hundred pounds of blankets to the pile and we’ll hunker down to 4°F one last time. And who knows, in a few weeks I might even start saying, “Boy I hope it cools a little, I’m stifling. Must be global warming.”
Second Week of April – So, Ya Know
Well, of course. I guess those stubborn raspberries were smarter than I am.
You know I was just thinking of turning off the heating system last night. I put away the snow blower but not the snow shovel, so…
Well, whatever.
Wednesday, Wednesday 02APR2025
Ah, the Spring Honey Do List. The most fiendish accumulation of annoying indoor and outdoor chores imaginable to the fevered brains of wives. I had just finished what I thought was my chores for the day and had taken a shower when I saw Camera Girl raking the leaves off of the edge of the woods and her flower beds. Now there is no more useless pursuit than raking leaves out of a forest but what can I say? Female fastidiousness is as powerful as it is inexplicable to the mind of man. When I saw the piles of leaves she had raked I foresaw her stooping to pick up all those leaves and painstakingly haul them to the other side of the property to her mulch pile and knew it would take days and break her back. So, I rushed out and told her to leave the leaves(!) to me and I’d chop them with my push mower. Hearing that I would be doing this she then proceeded to finish off the other woods for the sake of completeness. Ah Chihuahua! Well, no good deed goes unpunished.
But honestly chopping leaves with my trash mower is kind of fun. After four to eight passes (depending on how wet they are) the leaves just about disappear into thin air. It’s remarkable what steel and kinetic energy can achieve. And I did get to see all the plants she uncovered along the woods. The day lilies are about four inches tall.
The hostas near the woods haven’t appeared at all and some small woodland plants are already out and about.
After she left, I spent another half hour disintegrating the remaining leaves. When I returned inside Camera Girl came running over and thanked me profusely for sparing her all that stoop labor of moving the leaves to her mulch pile. And I thought to myself, “I am a good person, amn’t I? Why else would she be so happy. So, over the course of the evening several times I reminded her of how nice it was of me to come to her rescue and take care of the leaves. But what I noticed was that after each iteration of my reminder her gratitude seemed to diminish. And, in fact the decrease accelerated. At the end I believe it tailed off sort of like the curve of y=1/Xn where n= the number of reminders and y= her enthusiasm for the reminders. So, her enthusiasm approached zero as a limit but never quite reached it.
I brought up this observation to her. She used some Italian hand gestures from her distant past and went back to the cooking tasks that she was busy with. It’s a shame that her high school back in Sheepshead Bay didn’t do a better job of preparing her mathematically for her life ahead. Being able to graph and recognize the various curves of common functions is a basic requirement of our technological age. But we all have to be flexible and adapt ourselves to people as we find them. And that is a tenet of my relationship with her and I remind her of it from time to time.
April Fool’s Day 2025
No thirty inches of snow! No ice storm! No baseball sized hail stones! April Fool’s Day didn’t punish us here in New England. It’s a bloomin’ miracle. It’s a pretty nice day so Camera Girl handed me her “Honey Do” list. The one item I’m stalling on is walking the property with a garbage bag and a stick with a nail on it picking up all the trash that has blown into the wooded areas. As Sergeant Snorkel told Beetle Bailey, “If it don’t walk, if it don’t talk, police it!” But it’s annoying. It makes me feel very uncharitably toward the whole human race when I see what kind of stuff they toss out the windows of their cars.
So, I was driving down the main east-west road in Dunwich in a section that is full of blind curves and rolling hills when up ahead about a quarter of a mile I see something in the road. I see it’s moving but it’s too short to be an adult human so I slow down. “Could it be a child or is someone sitting or kneeling on the road? And then I can see. It’s a huge tom turkey with his feathers and wings all puffed up. He’s in the oncoming lane and he’s staring me down! So, I creep past him looking for his harem. But I couldn’t see them. Either they were shielded by the trees or they were gone. But Tom was sticking to his guns and wasn’t afraid of me. So, I left him there and in my rearview I could see him still standing there like some blithering idiot trying to act as crossing guard to an invisible flock.
After cutting down the raspberry canes last week I’ve been hoping to see some leaves sprouting up from the dirt. So far nothing.
But the hellebores are coming up. More confidently in the sunnier areas and tentatively in the shade.
And likewise for the daffodils. We have three different stages of development depending where they are on the property.
The hostas near the house have just broken ground.
And this little crocus is bravely showing its colors.
So winter is climatically over. I will now stow the shoe spikes, snow shovels, ice scrapers, snow blower, snow boots and all the rest of the paraphernalia that litters the mud room and move forward into the growing season. And now that the ground is completely thawed, I can begin things like fixing fences, gates, damaged wood and all the other weather-beaten components of my poor house and adjacencies.
And I will move the lawn mowers to the front of the shed and contemplate that fateful moment when I drive the mower over the grass for the first time this year. Right now, it’s unimaginable. Some of the grass is overly long and soaked with winter water in the soggier areas of the west field. Some areas are worn away by snow, ice and rain. Other areas are dead and brown. Cementing the whole thing over sounds like a better solution. But in just a very few days the darn thing will revive and life will return.
And in honor of this projected return of life I have put out ten preying mantis egg sacs. I purchased them from an American company that said they are Chinese mantids. Well, why not? Apparently, they’re already outcompeting the Carolina mantis right here in New England. Who am I to stand in the way of Darwinian selection?
The only thing left to cap off the beginning of spring is the reappearance of the pond turtles. They have not made their reappearance but Camera Girl will keep me apprised of their status.
“O brave new world that has such people in it!”
Emerging From the Cocoon
Just finished up a large and annoying project at work. So, I’m celebrating a day of freedom with a big mug of coffee that Camera Girl made for me. To paraphrase a line from a movie, “What did people do before they had coffee?” Someone once told me that the American Century was fueled on coffee and cigarettes. I could believe him. Could the decline in American effectiveness in so many arenas be attributed to the decline in smoking? It’s an interesting idea.
I’m looking out the window at the grass growing and the first butterflies of the year. Unfortunately, I’m also seeing the first carpenter bees of the season. For anyone lucky enough to not know what these are, they look like exceptionally large, aggressive bumble bees that burrow into wood (such as the outside of my house) and make a nest in which they lay their eggs. Camera Girl was picking some dandelions that were in one of her raised gardens when a couple of these destructive bugs started to buzz around her. I warned her away from the garden and promised to find out where they were burrowing and use lethal force to settle their hash.
May will be a very busy month both at home and work. And that’s fine. With the longer days and hopefully the warmer temperatures there will be more time to fix stuff and set things up around the grounds. Today I was reminded of another piece of carpentry that has intruded on Camera Girl’s sense of how things should be. And with the price of lumber and hardware reaching astronomical heights, what a wonderful time it is to be a homeowner.
The first hummingbird sightings have occurred and Camera Girl has put up her feeders. I’ll try this year to do a better job with the 200-600mm lens to get some really good shots of them. Yesterday I went out to get a few shots of the big elm tree that grows around here. The leaves were bursting out of their buds and the tree has a very distinctive appearance that I wanted to capture.
Another drama playing out this spring is the epic battle between Camera Girl’s pet crow Moe and his arch-enemy Poe (a newly arrived raven). She leaves scraps out for Moe in the morning but lately Poe shows up and snatches them. Just now Camera Girl called me over to the living room window to witness Moe dive bombing Poe and forcing him away from the snack area. Secretly I’m a fan of Poe. I’ve always wanted a raven in the neighborhood and this seems like my big chance. Maybe it’s my fate to become the man who made peace between Moe and Poe. I mean can’t they all just get along sharing the chicken fat? Nobel Peace Prize? We’ll see.
I think it’s time for a photo expedition. I’ll have to make a survey of what the local environment has to offer. There are usually some antique car rallies and such things but I was hoping for something a little different. What I think I’d like to get to is a gun show. I know very little about guns but I think they could make a very good photo opportunity. I’ve contacted one of the bigger shows to see if they have any qualms about photography.
Well anyway, we’ve finally put the last vestiges of winter behind us. I saw a spring peeper stumbling around after I raked up some leaves and he staggered away into the woods looking like Mitch McConnell blinking in the lights of the photojournalists trying to confirm that he is indeed still breathing.
This weekend we’re going to a lecture on the latest word on beekeeping. It’s been more than a decade since my last hive collapsed. I’ve watched a few videos on the “natural” beekeeping method. I stopped trying to keep them when the varroa mites devastated the whole industry back fifteen years or so. I’ve toyed with the idea of catching a wild swarm on the theory that these bees have come into equilibrium with the various pests and will fare much better than the heavily “medicated” hives that exist on the edge of succumbing to the very insecticides used to beat back the mites. I’ll ask this local expert what he thinks and who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at beekeeping again. Although I’ve been warned that between blueberries, raspberries and bees I’ll have every black bear in a fifty-mile radius lined up to clean me out. Such is life.
Well in the immortal words of George Costanza, “You know, Spring! Rejuvenation, re-birth, everything’s blooming, all that crap!”
01APR2023 – April Fool’s Day
Having now lived the majority of my life in New England, I’ve come to associate April Fool’s Day with twenty plus inches of heavy wet snow. Not because that is the inevitable result on April First but because it is the ironic result that would best capture the spirit of this odd “holiday.”
Well this year’s edition is a less dramatic but more typical version with cold rain and cool refreshing air that I find suits my mood today. I wandered out of the living room onto the lower balcony and breathed in that freshness and approved of the weather and the day and surveyed the soggy battered appearance of the “estate.” The forest is full of dead leaves and sodden moss. The fields are covered in brown grass and sodden moss. Here and there a few daffodils have blossomed. The pond is swollen with the rain and the mallards are nowhere in sight. Maybe ducks are just as sensible as I am and don’t like to get wet. Maybe they’re holed up in an old coyote den waiting out the rain. Naturalists would deny such a thing but I like to think that the animals that inhabit my habitat share in my virtues and vices. Why shouldn’t the ducks crave warmth and eschew getting wet? Very possibly the drake is often scolded by the duchess for forgetting to take out the trash on time and neglecting to repair the flushometer in the spare upstairs bathroom in a timely manner. To me all these things seem possible and in some way fitting. Although I somewhat doubt that the ducks have a spare upstairs bathroom. Probably just the one.
April First is a pivot point. For me it is the essential beginning of spring. Even the rare April First blizzard is a rearguard sally during winter’s final retreat into history. From now on it will be yard work to repair the ravages of winter and take advantage of the short growing season to grow the vegetables and flowers that we hope to produce. And it’s the signal for outdoor activities of all sorts; more walks in the forest and the search for photographic opportunities. It’s a very hopeful time of the year and even impossible hopes seem less impossible after the First of April.
The week ended well. Today should be a good day to work on the book. Well, let’s see where that goes. I look at the headlines and it’s Trump, Trump, Trump as far as the eye can see. Well, I haven’t got anything interesting or useful to add to that circus. The only thing worth noting is that the term banana republic is now completely ubiquitous and rightly so. Later on, something may occur to me and I’ll put virtual pen to virtual paper but for now I think I’ll put on a raincoat and boots and be at play in the fields of the Lord. But maybe I should take my cue from the ducks and cozy up next to the duchess where it’s warm. “What? I said I’ll fix that flushometer next week! Sheesh.”
01MAY2022 – OCF Update – May Day Comrades!
May Day! That glorious day when Soviet leaders would parade fake ICBM’s down the main street of Moscow to impress the world with their ability to make fake ICBM’s. And the music. Just inspirational.
Today is the second beautiful day in a row and I’ll be heading out with Camera Girl to photograph Spring! You know, renewal, rebirth, everything blooming, all that crap. She will be my driver and native bearer. A sort of combination of Frank Buck’s right hand man Ali and a Sherpa guide. Her job is to watch the road and if I shout to be let out on the road, she must try and find a spot where it won’t cause a major crash. Then she returns to pick me up after a few minutes without law enforcement intervening. It’s a delicate dance.
Yesterday I finally attacked the poison ivy. So far I seem to have escaped without dissolving into a puddle of festering sores and bubbling flesh. But there’s still time.
Today Camera Girl alerted me to a war going on in the field. For the last three years running a pair of barn swallows have taken up residence in one of the blue bird houses I put up. And for the third year running a blue bird shows up after they’ve set up house keeping and tries to dispute their ownership. He’s like the Occupy Wall Street of birds. And every year they kick his butt and send him packing. These blue birds are pathetic losers and I am ashamed that I installed these houses for them. No wonder they’re endangered. I’m renaming the houses barn swallow houses. I’ll leave the government and Section 8 housing for those shiftless blue birds.
Here’s one of their earlier attempts to steal back the house last year.
So anyway today will be Camera Girl and I at play in the fields of the Lord. But I’m sure to be back later to complain about something else. Enjoy the day.
11MAR2022 – OCF Update – It’s a Blooming Miracle?
Today Camera Girl excitedly announced that one of her bulbs had bloomed in front of the house. She said it was yellow and I couldn’t miss it. But it was so small that I passed it three times before I finally saw it.
I tried to be as upbeat as I could be but I don’t know. I’m going to have to buy a magnifying glass and install it on top of this flower along with some signage.
It’s pretty enough. But it’s not exactly eye-catching. Well, it was covered by snow yesterday so maybe it’ll increase in size later on. But I doubt it. From now on I’ll have her read the descritions on the flowers she buys and specifically avoid ones described as microscopic.
On a different note we got our tax papers finished today and the accountant showed that we’ll get something less than three thousand dollars back from Uncle Sam and the rest of the thieves. I intend to plow the money directly into some get rich quick scheme that involves a time machine and oil futures. Right now the details are still coming into focus. Or we might get the snow-blower fixed for next year. Right now it could go either way.