The Elysian Fields

.. quoth the snow. What's the past tense of snow? Snaw? Spring?

Took down half the holiday lights - haven't had them lit since January, but we missed the window to break out the ladder and take them down prior to the onset of Snow in February. The other half will have to wait for aforementioned ladder, which means Light and Lack of Snow, which should happen this weekend. Took them down while Justin was clearing off some cardboard that was allegedly going to be recycled but was left on the porch too long and turned into a sprawling cat bed (complete with decorative decapitated meeses).

Of course, the reason we were out on the porch was because the Musser Forests order had arrived and needed processing (unpack, shake out packing material, wrap in newspaper, put in buckets, moisten paper and add some water). Due to worries of freezing temps, they're down in the cellar - the garage gets too cold. Of course, the cellar has the dehumidifier, which is basically anti-plantlife, so we'll have to watch the moisture and get them into the ground as soon as we can.

Hopefully snow will clear down along the stream where the winterberry holly are going, and along Chestnut Grove where the hazelnuts will be. We're pretty much SOL for the hemlock - those are going along the back edge of the property in the trees, so it's not very likely that we'll be 100% snow cover free.

I have reviews to post - they're halfway between this system and that, and they'll be here. Eventually.

New guitar student starting Saturday - the father of the second student, who wants to make use of the guitar and some musical interest. Also have another two potential students - a guy at work and one of his daughters - that will hopefully be scheduled soon.

Stayed up too late last night, but I had wanted to write what is arguably *this* post of random updatia, but wandered off from the opening bit on biplanes. Saw two of them in action this morning, one flying out of the mist and haze, the other going to or from the Slatington airport.

Monday we went to get our taxes done - now I get to go back and smack them around a bit after verifying that we should get a deduction for donating Bessie even though the new regulations spend much verbiage on selling. There's the rather largish section explaining "usage" (which is what happened - they didn't resell the car as a fund raiser, they ripped it into shreds with the jaws of life for practice purposes) so that still counts for our purposes, no matter what the preparer and supervisor thought about it.

Tuesday I worked from home so I could attend a special luncheon at Rachel's school - the 45-60+ minute commute doesn't allow a mid-day back and forth run for lunch. Although my selection was a special "adults only" chef salad made for the occassion, the food was actually of a fairly high quality. Deb had an open faced turkey sandwich - one of the two choices the kids had - and it also looked reasonably edible. None of the ultra-processed, 4000 year old, slices of cardboard I fondly remember attempting to avoid in my youth.

Tuesday night, Deb headed up to Wilkes-Barre to attend a Pickletrack Nickleback concert with her cousin - she had a good time, although she's proving out our newly adopted surname of "Typhoid Mary" by going through the last few days with a stomach bug and a steadily worsening cold. Still, not a week this year where at least one of us hasn't been sick. She persevered through both the lunch and concert though, but more or less took yesterday off to recuperate. While she was off, we had a gourmet meal, bathed the baby, and went to bed half-way through a rather boring American Idol. Or, at least, I did. Justin stayed up for it.

Nothing of note happened yesterday, except for the aforementioned staying up too late and writing a wee bit. Well, that and many of the trees down here in tropical Lehigh Valley have decided to puff up and declare spring sprung.

Today I noticed that the forsythia were starting to do the same - be a couple of days to a week before they do so up in far north where I live. Then again, with the odd weather, it seems that the incredibly nice day we had yesterday might have strongarmed the usual gradual wave aeffect into an abrupt change across the entire range of my commute.