Hope, Spring, and Eternal Issues

Dale has alerted me to the first squirrel I've seen in months, hopping around the front yard. He must have just awoken from hibernating. Squirrels hibernate, right? I feel bad because he just climbed the birdfeeder pole and found nothing. There hasn't been food in it in months due to my having learned that feeding birds isn't good for birds. I should take down the feeders. This spring I plan to switch to feeding butterflies and hummingbirds. Yes, I realize hummingbirds are also birds.

It warmed up to 45 or so today and the snow pack is trying to melt around the edges. It would take a few days for it to melt totally and we're supposed to be heading back below freezing tomorrow, so this is just a tiny taste of spring. We went to the library this morning and Stanley remarked as we walked through the back yard that it would be nice to do some gardening again. This made me realize that now I have seen all the perennials, weeds, and tree and shrub blossoms that come up automatically around our house, so I can plan accordingly for annuals or splitting up hostas or trimming back certain weeds so they look like I intended for them to be there, and pulling up other ones as soon as I see them, rather than after they have sent roots into the bedrock. We don't have any big home projects planned this year (except trimming trees, fixing the chimney, and installing a projector TV in the basement, but those won't take long) so it looks like we'll have time to enjoy the deck and yard. Party!

Anytime I ever named a favorite color before now, I was lying. I would just make something up if I had to name a color. I never wanted to settle on a favorite color and I always felt that there weren't enough choices. But now I am happy to say that I have fallen in love with this one:



This shows several shades of it because I don't have a favorite shade of this particular color, and in fact I wish this swatch also contained darker and lighter version of it. I also don't like to label the color because it seems like color labels aren't consistent. But if you want, call it aqua, blue-green, peacock, teal, or turquoise. It bugs me though because the only way to know if something "turquoise" is going to be the color I want it to be is to look at it. I don't like the color of every turquoise I've seen. So I'm giving the color it's own name, which will be the random squiggly letters I'm asked to enter when I go to the comments page. The name of the color is "bermet". If I'm honest, this is the fifth option I was given after reloading the page to get a new letter string. I didn't like the first four.

This is great. I've succeeded in taking a giant step forward with my favorite color issue, while at the same time taking several giant steps backward with all the descriptions, qualifiers, disclaimers, and pretenses about the color.

A lot of the things I've purchased in the past few weeks have been this color and I was just going to post some photos but Stanley has arrived home from the grocery store so I need to put the food away.