Our lady slippers are out! We have two, just like last year. It’s very hard to get a good photo because they hide in an extremely awkward spot. Lady slippers are secretive.
Boulders I have known, in chronological order: 1) Across the road from my grandma’s house in Storrs, B) Where I used to wait for the school bus in Mansfield Center, 3) In our back yard in South Glastonbury, 4) At the very top of our property in South Glastonbury.
There’s an opossum in our back yard and he’s soooooooooo cuuuuuuuute!!!!!!!!!!! Aaaaaaaaa!!!!
He’s such a cute CHEWER!!! His mouth snaps open & shut and he has one pointy tooth that sticks out. What is he EATING??? (Bird seed, I guess.)
He looks soooooo soft!!! I WANT TO PET HIM SO MUCH!!!
He has a cute pointy piggie nose and cute pink TOES and a long skinny straight tail and lots of trembly whiskers & cute EVERYTHING.
He hates the snow! He likes the stone wall a lot better. Walking in the snow makes him disgruntled.
He’s been out there at least two hours! I wasn’t home at first but Dean saw him at 3:45 & texted me.
When I tromped back up the hill to close the loop on our snowshoe walk, Mrs. Downy was hungrily devouring the new food we’d put out. I stood watching for a breathless minute or two, camera in hands, before she flew away.
It’s SO bright with all the snow and sun and our big windows. It’s impossible to see our monitors properly, and all the paint colors on the walls look so incredibly clear and pure and beautiful, the way Caribbean water does. Especially the yellows and salmon in the dining room. They are so luminous, I can’t stop staring into that room, just letting my eyes swim in it. I had my new Maple Hill Creamery plain yogurt with a cup of Kona coffee and the bright intense flavors made my tongue so happy.
We are still snowed in but we are going to venture outside now and try walking around with our snow shoes. There are cute squirrel tracks (jump! jump! jump!) in the snow going from tree to tree to get to the bird feeders. :)
We just spotted a new hawk in our woods! It’s the Sharp-shinned Hawk, and it’s very small for a hawk. I did not notice whether its shins were particularly sharp.
Cute footprints in the snow on our patio today! What kind of animal do you think made them? They seem much too large for Reddy. I need Sherlock Holmes!
There’s an owl outside hooting his HEAD off tonight. It’s so loud, it’s easy to hear inside with all the windows closed. And our house is really well-insulated, too! He was doing it about three hours ago, and he’s still doing it. What’s going ON, owl?
Reddy is always around, lately! It really seems like he’s moved in and has a fort in the woodpile. Also, the regular gray squirrels haven’t been around at all lately, since the snow, even though the snow is almost all melted now. Did Reddy drive them away somehow???
I finished my scarf last night, but then I realized that I accidentally changed the stitch about a quarter of the way through. Heh. So now I’m unravelling it so I can do it over! This is actually kind of good, because loopy rip stitch is fun and pretty quick to weave so it’s not that annoying, and now I have more knitting to do while hanging around with Dean in the basement while he works on his radial arm saw refurbishment project.
!!!! Dean called me into his room to look out the window because Reddy just tried to climb up the triple-and-feed pole but got baffled, and while I was in there I spotted a SECOND RED SQUIRREL in the tree at the corner of the woodpile!!!!! It climbed down the tree to the corner of the woodpile, and then went up to the birdseed area under the triple-and-feed where Reddy was foraging around. Reddy chased it but we couldn’t tell if it was chasing-away style chasing or girlfriend-style chasing. Red squirrels are solitary and very territorial, so that’s why you usually only see one in each area, but they mate in late winter.
Last night we had an extra fortune cookie, so we assigned one of them to Reddy. Reddy’s fortune: “Mend the first break, kill the first snake, and conquer everything you undertake”! Wow! We have seen Reddy around a lot more often lately, especially over in the corner where the woodpile and stone wall meet up (he was out there again this afternoon), so now we think he is going to stake a real claim to his territory. We think he has a fort at the corner of the woodpile, and will have to mend a break it in, then win a face-off with a snake (which he will hang like a trophy above his door, as proof to all the other animals how indomitable he is), then become the squirrel boss of the yard! Dean actually saw him chasing away a much-larger regular gray squirrel at one point, so this is not as implausible as it sounds.
