Not Seasonal Affected Denial

Pay no attention to the snow behind the curtain. Just draw the shade. Besides, that isn’t snow, it’s too wet. It’s, um, early spring precipitation. Very early spring. And if you’ll believe that one, I know of a nice bridge from Lower Manhattan. Looks beautiful when it’s all lit up at night.

Ahhh!

50 degrees in October feels like the first intimation of winter. 50 degrees in March feels like a heat wave. The whole world seems to be breathing out one big sigh of relief. The snow is melting, the ice is gone, vast swaths of ground have reappeared. Granted, most of the soil doesn’t look so […]

A Guppy Named Sue

Well, well, well. Look who turned about to be a boy after all. The one pretty guppy of the six sisters is now quite beautiful, with a flaming red tail, and shiny white flag, and gleaming sides. So he has a name, now. Sue.

The ice vanishes, the snow drops

We were so close to getting rid of the ice. It was even forming cool shapes, like shelves on the front steps. The first snowdrop is lifting a white flower from the brown earth. But no. Now it’s all covered with a thin, thin layer of slick, white goop. Overnight it’s going to rain and […]

More green emerges

It’s getting warmer and it’s showing more greenery out there, but it’s looking a little like collards are not the sort of plants that consider a foot of snow good protection against winter. I haven’t seen them since I managed to cut a potful of leaves for greens on New Year’s Day. Now, I wonder […]

Melting

Could this be our February thaw? The ice is melting under the tiny shelves that form at the edges of the snowbanks. You can hear dripping all around outside. It’s still not melting fast enough to suit me, and while I was hacking at crunchy, cracking ice, I found out that my scarf is indeed […]

Orchids are up

So if orchids are from the tropics, why do they flower in the dead of winter here? Not that I’m complaining, now that the stalk has just finished opening. There’s five flowers all together, but since they opened to alternating sides, it’s hard to get a picture showing them all at once. You just have […]

Do guppies say cheese?

I seem to have veered off in a new direction. Take a picture. Write about it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. It’s easy to do most days, except I can’t really call it a direction. Worse, today we had dimsum, but didn’t take any pictures. And we went for a long walk, but didn’t take any pictures. […]

Plot conflict #7B: woman against ice

I love the sound of ice hacking in the morning. It sounds like…winter. Since I’m a bit crazy and I’m one of those disgusting people with a naturally high set-point for happiness, so my second thought on seeing half an inch of ice on everything (my first was the obvious) was Cool! I finally have […]

Caught a junco, sort of

With their dark grey backs, juncos are really easy to spot against the snow, but they move so quickly, it’s really hard to get a picture. This morning, the juncos (and the sparrows and the starlings and the cardinals) were hungry. They were all over the feeders, the sunflower seed, the nyjer, the suet. They […]