Yardage

Over a week ago, I met "the Silver Fox" and Mo on the southside for a chat over second breakfast. On the way down Cary Street Road, I noted forsythia and daffodils starting to bloom. A day or two before, Phiance had asked if the mild winter would fool birds into nesting too soon. I said I thought that birds noted amount of daylight more than temperatures. It's plants, I told him after that breakfast date, that are most in danger of being fooled by the warm weather. I think they go by ground temperature. I know that these early bloomers are cold-hardy, but yesterday I noted my own daffodils with leaves up and setting flowers and now I am worried about losing them. My lenten roses have new leaves and buds, too, but I think they bloomed February - spring last year, so they could be okay in the cold snap due to start tonight.

New in our yard: we put up a bird feeder yesterday. We know we should be patient, but we keep peeking out the windows. So far this morning, I have noted one junco on the ground, way far away from the feeder.

The feeder was part of a day-off we-must-do-something-about-this-house frenzy that I instigated. We got a fourth set of plastic shelves for the basement, and so got all camping gear and stuff stored in cardboard boxes up off the floor. As well as shelves, I had a pegboard on my mind for a YEAR. Enough; let's just do it. You know what's odd? Hanging a pegboard meant a trip to a box store, a comedy of sticking the 4'x4' item in the trunk, and led to at least an hour and half of basement cleaning -- but actually smacking it up on the wall took about five minutes. There's a deep meaning there, somewhere, but this kink I got in my shoulder from dragging around basement junk is keeping me from thinking straight.

Read: Sibley's Birding Basics and Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie, by David Lubar. The latter, a newish book, appears on lists for YA librarians like "funny books" and "clean reads," and it is both. It's also well-written, if light. The titular freshman is bright and uses good vocab words, but he also defines them for his buddies (and readers) in an amiable way. I'm not really sure what kind of kids I'd "sell" it to -- he's too much of a nice kid to sell it to my tough boys, and my nice boys tend to prefer fantasy, SF, and graphic novels. I guess that leaves our nice girls.