Outside it looks and feels like April, or at least April's north country version -- snow melting, lawn gradually appearing, air mild enough that one can go outdoors without a jacket or down vest. When I stepped out the door this morning, the sound that greeted me was the burble of water from snow-melt dribbling through the downspouts. A cheery sound, that, despite the periodic punctuation of distant deer-hunting gunfire.
The downside of sudden faux spring snow melt: roads and parking lots that were hard packed dirt just 2-3 days ago have become expanses of water and mud. Messy.
With the onset of friendlier weather, I got the chance to do some pre-cold weather/pre-Madrid tasks the early winter made impossible, one being the reconstruction of a tiller that had been sitting lonely and forlorn in the garage. At least tossing it together to the point where I could haul it out and push it to the barn where it'll sit out the winter months. There's nothing like pushing/dragging heavy machinery up a couple of hundred feet of snow-covered, upsloping lawn. (On the other hand, it was nice to have the kind of weather that allowed me to drag heavy machinery around like that.)
Meanwhile, a loved one down in North Carolina has been keeping me posted re: events in the life of a friend of theirs, H. Because of all the rain some days back and the resultant softening of the ground, a big old oak tree in H.'s front yard toppled over, falling across the street so that a crew had to come out and cut it up and incurring unexpected expense. The following dispatch arrived today:
"I talked with H. today. He said the Stump Buster came. Said he looked like Jerry Garcia. Had a HUGE piece of equipment that cost him $200,000 but reduced this mammoth stump to sawdust which then got mixed in with soil to a depth of 2 feet, in about an hour and a half. H. said the equipment was lime green and mr. buster was color-coordinated in a lime green and bright yellow outfit right down to wearing bright yellow plastic sunglasses. Man, I'd love to have seen that!"