Superbowl Sunday was a gorgeous day here. In fact, the past 4 or 5 days have been immoderately nice, causing most people to shake their heads slowly and say, “But we really need rain.” Seriously, there is no satisfying folks sometimes. It can be a jewel of a day – the light just so, the birds putting on a spring concert that you suffer months to hear back East, and the earth smelling like heaven itself, and someone will complain that it’s not raining.
Yes, it’s grounded in truth; we need the rain. Towns are starting to go into panic mode around here and it’s only February. It’s going to be a long summer I think. But unless you know a helpful rain dance or have some major connections above, why complain on a day that’s simply a gift? So Sunday we took a hike up a nearby hill, and this is what we saw:
We took our dear friends and neighbors who are moving to Houston at the end of the school year. Was this a little underhanded? Perhaps. Michael kept breathing in deeply and sighing. Do I feel bad about it? Nope. I want them to miss it so much that they scurry back as quickly as possible.
On that note – East coast family? What temperature do you see outside your window? This is FEBRUARY here. Just think about it. We have a guest suite with your name(s) on it.
In the afternoon we stopped by our friend Denise’s house to watch the game and to have dinner with a group of friends. It was delicious and relaxing. Her garden looked like a fairy tale in the afternoon light:
Today we finally got a bit of the rain we needed. I just read that typically January is our wettest month, averaging about 11 inches of rain, and this year we had 1.08 inches. So today’s rain was a welcome sight. When Hot Wheels and I rode to class this morning, he had a blast going through all the puddles, as evidenced here:
He started out with a couple perfect muddy racing stripes, but once I told him they were there, he rode through every puddle asking, “There – did that wash them off?” Not exactly.
It was a great day for birds, though. They were all out, and the egrets were looking particularly fetching with their neck feathers all puffed out like boas. We didn’t see any herons, but they get the day off because yesterday I finally saw one eating a gopher. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me since they gulp down fairly sizable fish, but something about that picture is all wrong. It really should have a wicked stomachache today!