Aaaahh, Spring!

It's spring time and the weather is acting like a yo-yo. Up and down, up and down, repeat.

Yesterday turned out to be a glorious day after the showers and 40 mph winds of Saturday. Not a cloud in the sky all day, nary a wind to be found and temperatures soaring into the mid 60s. Of course that changed after dark.

Clouds moved in after sunset but still the gibbous moon was shining brightly hen I went to bed at 10 PM. At 3:30 AM I woke up to the sound of heavy rain (and Terry getting up to take care of her beeping, battery depleted cell phone). Then at 4:30 AM Julie started caterwauling at the door and when that didn't get us up, she banged against it. She gave up after 15 minutes. Chester didn't start until 6 AM but he didn't give up--so we did.

Monday morning it was still drizzling and the temperatures had dropped to 40 degrees. The rain would stop but the sun made only very brief appearances when the clouds couldn't keep their act together. And despite the clouds coming out of the south, the temperature got no higher than 45 degrees all day.

Terry took off for an EGA (Embroiders' Guild of America) meeting in Horseheads around 9 AM then she headed off to New Jersey and a party with her lady friends in the Garden State Chapter of SAGA (Smocking Arts Guild of America) tonight. She'll stay at her mom's tonight and tomorrow night, taking our daughter out to lunch/dinner (im not clear on this) on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, I'll be watching carefully to see if we get the 1+ inch of snow that's forecast tonight and/or the snow showers predicted for Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. The high tomorrow will be around 40 degrees--maybe. Then Thursday were back over 55 again and a reasonable day. They say we'll get showers on Friday and temps in the high 40s. Saturday brings a chance of showers and mid 50s again.

The occasional warm, sunny days interspersed with the rain has brought a change in the scenery. I raked the lawn and spread some fertilizer a few days ago. I don't know if the fertilizer has been washed away, but the grass that's out there (and there are lots of bare spots) is turning bright green. You can see it in the fields down below, too. Or at least you can see it on those fields that were cut/cropped close last fall. All of a sudden they are switching from brown to green. You can almost stand on the deck and see it happening.

The shad bush trees are starting to bloom and the red maple buds are going to burst open any second now. The latter are already showing quite a bit of red. Most of the farms that had buckets out to collect sap from their sugar maples have pulled them for the season. It's not cold enough at night and the trees are starting to produce bud sap which has a different and very inferior flavor. You can still see places where they have the plastic tubing up draining into large containers, but most of that will be spilled or go into animal fodder with little boiling to thicken it until they get around to pulling the tubing and its taps (spiles?) from the trees.

Oh, another sign of spring: The Mets won their opening day game today, beating the Cincinnati Reds 2-1 behind 5.2 innings of 3 hit ball by Johan Santana and 3.1 inning fo no-hit ball by Sean Green, J.J. Putz and Francisco Rodriguez. Dan Murphy knocked in both NY runs with a solo home run and a ground out. On a negative side, the Mets had 9 hits and got 7 walks yet only scored 2 runs? What's up with that?

Actually, the Mets winning on opening day is hardly news. As it says at the link above, despite losing their first eight opening day games, they have the best record in baseball ever for opening days. They are 31-17 on opening days. It's September when they seem to have trouble.