The O-Zone

First day of Spring! Tra-la comes to mind.  Now maybe it will stop snowing.  At least it doesn’t stick around very long.

Spring migrants have been returning to the mountain and in the valley by the river. Mountain Bluebird, Western Bluebird, Spotted Towhee, Western Meadowlark (or as Dan likes to call them, Giant Junco – inside joke), Robin, Violent Green Swallow (they are tough little guys), Say’s Phoebee, Dark-eyed Junco.

And a new yard bird!

Playing that most favorite game shared by birds of every species... Peek-a-boo.

I’ve joined the ranks of bad bird pictures.  If they would sit still and stop hiding around behind tree trunks and branches, this would be so much easier.

Any guesses as to what this might be?  Dan says, “Oh sure, everybody will know this one!”  I’ll give a hint.  It’s called a Williamson’s Sapsucker.

Four weeks to Hummingbirds.  We bought a 25 pound bag of sugar to use for the hummingbird feeders.  It should last most of the summer.

Our new Outback. We decided that 17 years was long enough to keep the old Outback, though we find ourselves missing it. It was a really great car, and hopefully this one will last every bit as long.

What’s really neat about this new Outback and the Subaru Legacy GT we bought a couple of years ago is that the controls on the the inside of the car are the same between the two vehicles.  I love the color, Graphite Gray – it changes the way it looks depending on ambient light conditions.  This year when we want to go investigating some road way out in the middle of nowhere, we won’t need to worry about breaking down in the most inconvenient way possible.  Not that our other Outback ever did that to us, but at 17 years old it was really a matter of time.

Watching snow melt is sort of like watching paint dry… just not as fast.

Less than two feet of snow on the ground now. Progress, of sorts, is being made.

The driveway is a sheet of ice, especially the small hill we have to go down to get to the garage.  With a bare touch of the brakes, we can get the Outback going sideways, but fortunately the high snowbanks on either side keep us from going too far sideways.

Another five or six inches so far in the last 18 hours, and no sign it is going to stop soon.

No point in shoveling the sidewalk until the snow stops. And if I shovel the sidewalk, it will snow again. A conundrum, to be sure.

Really????

We have had about eight inches of snow the last couple of days. Everytime I shovel the sidewalk, it snows again. Perhaps this is cause and effect.

It staggers our minds to think in two months there will be wildflowers, green grass, and hummingbirds arriving at our windows and peering in, asking where are their feeders, assuming we don’t get them up ahead of time.  Can’t even imagine “green.”

One day it can be snowing, the next day fog moves in and coats everything with frost, and then the fog disappears and sunshine reigns supreme.

Spring-ish snowflakes. Big. Fat. Fluffy. Numerous.

Frost covered trees as the fog lifts.

I saw something very cool on Saturday as I was driving down the hill, just below our house.

A cat by the side of the road.  Who is that, I wondered.  Then the cat dove headfirst into a snowbank, and emerged moments later with a Pocket Gopher in its mouth.  While it was in the snowbank, I noticed no tail.  The cat looked at me, and then took two or three jumps across the snow and landed on the side of a Ponderosa Pine, about four or five feet above the ground, and a second later was sitting on a large branch looking at me, prey still firmly clamped in its mouth.  A Bobcat.  Cool!!  I was so glad I hadn’t ruined their hunting expedition.

We hear them calling this time of year, in fact when I went out to take a picture I heard this bird’s partner calling in the distance.  And because they hunt in the day time, we get to see them occasionally.

Dan spotted this bird in the tree in front of the house.  The Chickadees were having a fit about a predator, and it was pretty easy to take a picture of him hiding in the tree near the seed feeders.   He only thinks he’s invisible.

These little predators are about five inches long, a small bird but really big on attitude and blood-thirsty points of view. The Chickadees are right to be very concerned.

Those piercing eyes were focused on a Chickadee that was sitting on a nearby bush, yelling about the owl he had located.

Friday was National Chocolate Cake Day, and of course I had to do something about it.  I made cupcakes and we’re still celebrating.

Dark chocolate cupcake with a chocolate icing. I thought about putting sprinkles on top but decided that would be merely silly.

Really cold air came down from the north and collided with warmer (relatively), moist air from the west, and we ended up with about five inches of snow.  If the forecast is accurate, we should see another two to five inches of snow by tomorrow morning.  It’s a good thing we plowed the driveway yesterday.

This morning all that moisture created a fogbank, shrouding the hillside as the sun came up.

A lavender world. Neat!

Swiftly fly the days. Or something like that.

Cold Arctic air came to visit us, bring 2F for our low temperature and clear skies (finally). Slightly past full, the moon set in a pink sunrise.

Then all day, clear skies and cold.  Our solar panels like this sort of weather a lot.  Nothing much happened today.

Clouds were forecast, and here they come, bringing a pink sunset. It should moderate the overnight low temperatures. Splitting lots of firewood to keep the house warm.