cage match

Ack!  I am behind schedule on everything right now, but wanted to make an effort to put out something this week.  

April Fools!  This pizza...

...is actually a big cookie, with frosting "sauce" (I ran out of red food coloring so it wasn't super convincing) and frozen/grated white chocolate for the cheese.  It was delicious!

Todd was also surprised by Nicolas Cage in our car back-up camera...

...courtesy of a small photo taped in front of the lens.  :)

Easter!  I made a really tasty carrot cake with a really easy frosting method.  Squiggles I can do.

Spring ephemerals!  They are going crazy right now.  Todd and I  have been so busy that I'm not even sure we'll get in our spring ephemeral hike this year, but I've seen so many on our regular trails...

yellow trout lily

virginia bluebells

celadine poppy

dwarf larkspur

dutchmans breeches

prairie trillium

And when the mayapples get tall...

Morels come out!

I gathered some and fried them up for supper this week.

Oh, redbuds are here and almost gone!

Ferns...

Trees...

spicebush 

norway maple

Bushes...

burning bush

Everywhere we go...

...we see life returning to the forest.  And some unwanted life, despite our cold winter...

Ticks have been insane this spring.  Even though Pepita is on a flea/tick preventative, she has had multiple ticks, and brought multiple ticks into the house.  Todd has found two ticks crawling on his body this week too.  Now we rub her down every single time she returns from being outside, with extra checks during the day.  So far so good!

Everyone is enjoying the sunshine.

We're going to have a lot more of it soon...we're running full-tilt into late spring...somehow!  Lots to do before the spring ends.  More soon!

green machine

 Another huge temperature fluctuation...53 degrees in one night!

This Thursday, it's supposed to go from 85 (day) to 27 (the next night).  Pretty wild.  But I'm loving all the green that's coming back with these warmer days!

Golden Ragwort

From a waking red maple

see the tiny flowers?

American elderberry

bronze fern

common cinquefoil

cutleaf toothwort...the first spring ephemeral!!!

cranefly orchid

a 12-spotted pink lady beetle on birds-eye speedwell

We had some freak snow...again...

...but it stopped after an hour or two and had completely melted by the afternoon.  

We went hiking at one of our favorite places, Bean Blossom Bottoms.  Not a lot of green yet...

...but still plenty to see, including emerging greens!

Finally some exercise for this chonk!

Looking forward to April and a real explosion of color!

the grass is always greener over the septic tank

 The snow is gone!

With temps suddenly in the upper 70s, things started becoming green pretty quickly (cell phone pics because camera battery dead).

I started setting daffodil bouquets all over the house.

And then...we went from 78 degrees to 15 degrees.  Hard freeze, lasted for days.  We went from this...

...to this.

And...

A hard, prolonged freeze won't kill the plants, but the flowering daffodils are certainly goners, and maybe even the buds that weren't open yet.  I'm kicking myself for not picking more to save them!  At least we have another temperature jump coming, up to 78 degrees in a couple of days.  I'm not quite done with winter yet, although my hands have really suffered from the cold this year.  It'll be nice for things to moderate a bit.  We had this just two days ago!

From almost 80 to snow in a day is crazy.

We had some excitement here recently!  Water started backing up into the showers and toilets weren't flushing well.  The big fear - the old septic system had finally kicked the bucket.  Cost for a new system:  up to $20,000!  Add to that the fact that we'd been getting torrents of rain last week and no septic company could come out and look.  No work could be done in the mud.  That meant 2 minute showers, no laundry, and bucket toilets.  We had the tank pumped:

It didn't help.  Feeling pretty desperate to get things moving, Todd called someone we'd worked with before.  He excavated the main pipe and distribution tank...

...and determined that we'd cut our driveway directly over the line/tank (knowing, of course, that it was nearby...just thought it was further off to the right).  Driving over it over time had constricted the pipe and crushed the box.  He was able to dig up and replace those components...

...and pour gravel over the pipe to help bear the weight (better than soil, which compacts easily).

It was a fraction of the price of replacing the whole system, and everything seems to be working normally so far.  Fingers crossed that it was the correct fix!

In other news, perimenopause hormone stuff continues to make my hair wavier and wavier.  My hair has always been stick straight so it's been a real learning curve with this new hair type.  

I mainly go back and forth between brushing it (it becomes huge, fluffy, and frizzy) and letting it air dry with a quick spray-gel scrunch (but it makes me crazy not to be able to brush it when I do this) and it always feels on the verge of being Weird Al-esque: (flat and frizzy):

I'm getting it layered soon and hopefully that will help.

Around the house, just pets...

...and the usual stuff.  Hoping for a bit of warm weather soon!  :)