making tracks

 With temperature fluctuations like this...

...and frequent rain...

...we're seeing a lot of really pretty fog.

Even with the regular frosts, there's more GREEN.

putty root orchids

haircap moss

Pepita approves.

In just three weeks, she'll be a year old.  Time flies!

Remember this tiny puppy?  Maybe 7 or 8 lbs.?

Now she spends her evenings passed out on the couch, all 25 pounds pressed up against my back, snoring like a freight train.

Is she potty trained?  Nope, she still has enough accidents (maybe one a month) that I haven't put any of the house rugs back down.  She still struggles with impulse control with the cats...but she's getting better.

The cats have plenty of places to escape to, anyway.

The Barnacle in my puzzle box.

Frances on his heated pad atop my puzzle shelf.

Calliope on my heated keyboard pad.

My work photography station, with one well-intentioned but somewhat in-the-way cat looking for attention

So many personalities keep things interesting around here!

Hard to believe that we'll be seeing snow again in a few days.  I'd like to get out and inspect the back pond when it happens.  As you can see from this trail cam still, we get a lot of animal tracks back there.

We'll see how it goes!

ice rosette, no spring yet!

 We've gone from this...

freak snow right after a 70 degree day, 3 inches!  The snow was completely gone by late afternoon.

...to this!

bulbs popping up everywhere!

actual insects!  This is a female Pale Brindled Beauty moth.

a bee!  Struggling between two boards on our porch.

Nice to get a few more animals-in-snow shots.  As his thick coat suggests, this coyote probably isn't bothered by the snow at all!

A little territory-marking by this bobcat.

Now that the snow's gone, I can see that we have a ton of Chinese praying mantis oothecas.

I think I've found 13 so far.  Normally I like to take a pretty hands-off approach to interference with nature, but these invasive mantises will kill our native ones.  They also kill bees, butterflies, and even humming birds!  I don't want them in my garden, so they'll all be collected and burned.  Each ootheca can hold up to 400 eggs!  My garden would be completely overrun.

Now that the snow is gone, we're at that strange place between winter and the first real green of spring, and it can be hard to see as much natural beauty.

Thank goodness for fungus!  ;)

It's not always easy to identify, but I love seeing the different shapes and colors.  

More color in the sky...

Something else that's kind of interesting...I've noticed these "stars" in our front pond.

Even Thoreau wrote about these strange things ("ice rosettes"), but there isn't a consensus on what causes them.  Some people think that it's a warm current of groundwater that causes this fracture, while others suggest that a flaw in the ice allows for water to move, spread, and separate out.  I don't think I've noticed it before this winter!  

A chilly start to March!  Not putting the quilts away yet.  We'll see what the next weeks bring!

the season is freezin'

 The season is moving along with the usual weather ambiguity!  We had endless freeze and steady snow...

The wild animals took it in stride!

Then suddenly, it was 70 degrees.  Still took a couple of days to melt the snow...

It made some gorgeous fog.

Warm enough to get out and hike, even with a bit of residual ice!

Crazy to still see some green under all that snow.

August and February are my least favorite months.  August for the swampy heat and humidity, and February because...I love cold weather all through fall, through Christmas, and January has great snow.  February is the cold, bare, bleak stretch between the cozy winter snow of January and the new green shoots and warmer days of March.  But it's nearly over, and the snow helped a lot!

So did the pets.

 Definitely good company!