pollen fallin'

A red-tailed hawk has been spending a lot of time in our backyard lately.

I'm usually alerted to his presence by the cawing of crows.  A group of crows can 'mob' a hawk in a pre-emptive strike, and it's interesting to watch them gather on branches around the hawk and engage in intimidating swooping.  I wonder if this is the same hawk that spent so much time around here last year.  Check out that red tail!  

 

Hawks are doing slow circles in the sky every day.  They  make beautiful silhouettes.

The birds are definitely out lately.  When I go outside in the morning to feed the strays, it's usually still dark.  But there's a cacophony of sound from the birds.  I do my best to identify calls.  I love hearing one of my favorites, the house finch.  They're such cheerful little birds, and now they're everywhere, preparing nests! 

It's a bittersweet time of year, because the camellias are finished.  Oh, I can still get a few from the bushes, but they're limp within a day or so.  The azaleas are popping out, at least!

Even my favorite azalea is opening up.

The usual bouquets...they make me happy.

A brief period of pollen...

...and more signs of spring.  New fern fronds unfurling in our backyard...

...and woodland flowers in the woods.

Sweet Clotilde sleeps on our back stairs, watching it all happen!

Meanwhile, I have done little knitting and no sewing.  Just so busy.  But I did take some time out to bake a cake when we had company recently.  I used to bake layer cakes, but we'd always have so much leftover cake.  Now my go-to is the simple chocolate loaf cake from Smitten Kitchen.  It doesn't need any embellishment, but sometimes I whip up a little sour cream chocolate frosting.

Absolutely perfect...and nearly no leftovers!  :)

Have a great week! 

The 'morel' of the story...

Spring has sprung for sure around here - even a month ago, that cold snap aside.  Everything is so green.

We've started going down to the pond after supper.  Sometimes the geese are out, and even a mysterious creature that might be a beaver or river otter, but most likely a muskrat.

It's funny how things fall into a yearly schedule here.  Percival Wemys, the intrepid Carolina wren, has come back and is sleeping on our front porch again.

Once again, I hung up my big ferns, and once again, they were immediately colonized by house finches.  Here's the red-capped male...

...and the plainer female.

I pulled down the ferns and saw that a very solid nest was already in one, with no eggs.  Of course a nest can't be disturbed if eggs are inside, but it's fine if no eggs have been laid (other than the birds' annoyance at having to build a new nest elsewhere).  The fact is, I'm in and out of that door all day, and the birds would constantly be disturbed.  I'd also be unable to water my ferns.  I read that birds dislike shiny things, so I make aluminum foil 'snakes' and coiled them amid the fronds.  Here is the male looking quizzically at the new development:

I felt pangs of guilt all day, but I'm happy to report that I still hear the finches singing every day and they've clearly stayed close, but built a new nest elsewhere.  Phew!

Clematis are blooming!  I'm not a huge fan of these floppy purple varieties...too tropical-looking...but I still pick them for the house.

Their centers almost seem to glow in the light!

We've still got our late-blooming azaleas:

...but I'm afraid that these are the last of the camellias.

I'll even miss all the insects that get dragged in with them.  This is a Zelus luridus, the pale green assassin bug.  They set "sticky traps" to catch other insects.  I'd love to see one in action!

Well, until I have time to get outside and search for insects, I can still enjoy all the green, and the dogwoods, from the sun porch.  The cats have set up in there, where they'll remain for the next 8 months:

They love all the windows.  Here's Tabitha, fierce hunter, preparing to attack a hapless butterfly:

All around us, buds on trees are unfurling.  Oh, spring is a beautiful thing.

We've even got some morels coming up in the yard, although Todd refuses to believe my mushroom-identifying ability.  Hey, I was mushroom hunting by the time I was 5 or 6 years old, but I guess this one will remain uneaten! #trustissues

I just haven't had much time for craft work, but hopefully I'll have something to report soon.

Have a great week!

Disembodied heads and rainbows, instead

Part of becoming ultra-organized and taking time to appreciate the little things includes making a bigger deal out of heretofore-ignored holidays.  So when St. Patrick's Day came around, I decided to go all out.

First, the cookies.  A simple batch of chocolate and vanilla, but you divide up the vanilla batch and color it.  Rainbow order, of course!

You then roll each color into a log, Play-Doh-style, and smash them together.  In hindsight, I wish I would've rolled each color out flat so the distribution would've been more even...more like a rainbow and less like a peacock feather or a creepy rainbow eyeball.

Encase the log in chocolate...

Refrigerate, then slice and bake.

See the creepy eyeball?  Oh, well.  The chocolate isn't very sweet, and the vanilla tasted almost like frosting.  Delicious!  Here's the recipe if you want to try it yourself.  

Moving on to decorations...I found this 4-leaf clover banner at a thrift store for a quarter.

Green placemats and napkins...green-tinted flowers (helleborus from the yard)...a green box to set the mini vase in...

...and green ribbons for the chairs.

We felt very festive eating our rainbow cookies here!  Time-wise, the cookies were made over 2 days. The slice-and-baking day was very quick.  The "greening" of the dining room was done amid shifting batches of cookies in and out of the oven, so the whole thing was done in 30 minutes.  Not a huge time investment for a lot of enjoyment!

Speaking of time investment, though, I'm ready to put a fork in Fancy Baking Day.  My March effort was a total bomb.  I tried to make a strawberry fraizier - a lemon chiffon layer cake with homemade almond paste, homemade pastry cream, and homemade whipped cream.  I took a morning off work to make it and it ended up taking over 4 hours in total, not counting the clean-up after (which was considerable).  My pastry cream was runny, I didn't have enough almond paste, and the thought of trying to stack and decorate it in the fancy way the example showed was too overwhelming at the end.  I did it my own sad, slanting way, with strawberries sliding in the wet pastry cream and big empty patches from the scarcity of whipped cream.

At least the taste was amazing.  But...NEVER AGAIN.

I've very slowly been working on a new quilt, but my heart hasn't been in it.  I'm not crazy about the scrap fabrics (by the way, those corner stars have been fixed and now align with the rest of the quilt), and my lack of enthusiasm affected my work, with sloppy joins and wonky seams.

I guess I'll go ahead and sew it together.  Maybe I'll be more inspired.

Here is the quilt on day 2.  I'd thought it would be fine on the floor overnight, but I underestimated the vigor of our cats!

Speaking of cats and quilts...they might love them more than I do.

We're back to the season of beautiful sunsets...

But alas, the warm and intermittently very cold days have decimated our azaleas.  They should be going full-bore until late April, but the blooms are all spent now.  I got one poor-quality picture of the two under our living room window last week...

...and have eked one last limp bouquet out of one of the front bushes.

The real disappointment is that my very favorite double-ruffled azaleas didn't even get a chance to open up before the frost got them.  No more until next year...sob!

I've got a few last camellia blossoms around, their blooms frequently toppling over and rolling around on the floor like disembodied heads.  I'm not ready to rely on dyed carnations from the grocery store yet...I went out and cut tons of helleborus.

Helleborus last FOREVER in vases - weeks! - but I just don't like them much.  Maybe the brevity of the other bouquets make them a little more special?  Whatever the reason, I'm just glad that I've got SOMETHING to enjoy!  And there's always next year!

At least Todd is in a good mood, despite our poor flower season.  ;)

Have a great week!