There are bobcats and then there are bobcats...

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Aq9Pmd0-MsU_o35AspCP4APQ8jcq-1BS/view?usp=sharing

click on the link itself 

Hat Bear over the years

                                                          Bedouin Bear

                                                                  Farmer Bear

                                                                  Dress  up day

                                                                   Forest Management Bear

                                                        I'm too fancy for my hat

                                                             Ski Bear

                                                    Scrappy Bunny wanted to play too

When you don't have a chin, this happens

 

I am such a grownup

 Had our first (Moderna) Covid shot this week,  scheduled for the next one May 19th.  

I am so proud of us, lol.  We both got the sore arm syndrome, mine felt like someone hit me with a baseball bat.  But oh those tiny needles are magic. Just a twinge.  

NH has vaccinated over 1 million people so far; I realize by city standards like NYC or Boston that's a piffly amount, but considering our general population is only 1.36 million, that's remarkable.  

Do You Love Me, robot style

 

So much changes

 When I was a little girl,  my dad and I used to go for walks down the road, exploring.  I was about three in this picture.    If you squint, to the left ahead of us you can see the faint outline of a small dark  house that was no longer there when I was older,  It either fell in, or someone took it down.

I actually remember this day,  we had gone for a walk beyond that house and over the brow of the hill, to see some loggers working.   They were using oxen to drag the huge trees out of the woods, and the logging road was a pure mess of  mud.  It was a noisy, smelly, scary experience,  and I never forgot it. 

What amuses me about this photo:  notice the  trailing cats behind us.  It always amuses me how they choose to follow, rather than lead.  You look back, and if you have five cats,  you have five cats behind you, patiently  plodding along.  And if you decide to turn around and come home, so do they. 

That was also the year my dad decided to lose some weight:  children can be sooo damned observant.  

 Yep, it's spring.  

Having our annual April snowstorm.  4 inches yesterday and a bit more today, just in case some of it melted away overnight.  The jonquils are blooming bravely through it all,  Chartlie goes out every hour or so and sits and stares.  Toby went tearing out the door yesterday, did a perfect U-turn and came back in, most annoyed.  

Those are forsythia blooms, in front of the old well.  Yellow, which is always the color of spring, does not go well with white. I always think of scrambled eggs and potatoes.  

April Hope and realities

 Every April I go through this, maybe we all do, as the solstice hits; for some it's the end of summer, for some it's the end of winter, and for some, like us, we're caught in the middle between blizzards and 'good days'.  

I was, as a kid, always puzzled by a picture in a book of  R.L. Stevenson poems illustrated for children,  and it was of this happy little girl in a swing,  in MARCH, wearing a cotton dress and a sweater.  I knew nothing of other countries at that age and assumed someone had got it horribly wrong.  We had blizzards.  My swing set was frozen in place in the barnyard, and the only way to get to it was to put on a snowsuit and slide out on my sled.  

However.  We count down the days like any kid waiting for Christmas, and each day when I look out the kitchen window the sun has moved a tad closer to the north.  But April is a pill of a month.  Some days it's warm enough to actually let the stove go out, some days it's cold enough to snow. And often does.  

I resist the idea of putting in the screen door sashes, it seems the minute I even think of that, the temps drop and a wind rises.  Coincidence?  Snow is being mentioned as a possibility.  

But the flowers are stirring, the sap is rising, and  by now the sun is half way back across the sky.  I have hope. And tomorrow I will venture out to see if the Trillium is blooming yet.   

maple buds

 It's been  a long hard year. Maybe it's me.   but the robins have arrived,  en masse, and the chickadees  have begun their  spring ritual of fighting like tomcats over territory. Out in the woods, pileated woodpeckers are drumming away, and yesterday when I was out stacking wood I looked up and saw two turkey vultures so high up they kept disappearing intoclouds so thin I couldn't even see them.  They were like ghost birds. 

Let's see what happens here.