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 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!

winter peepers

Christmas is over...but it was fantastic while it lasted!

Cookies were baked and distributed...

...and I flavored, split, and rolled special mini batches for us to enjoy a different Christmas cookie every night in the week leading up to Christmas.

Todd had both a daily gift for Advent and a daily joke that he pulled from our wooden calendar with tiny little drawers.

Todd bought me a special Die Hard advent calendar, too!

On Christmas, I got up early and made a cinnamon roll...big enough to fit in a 9" pie pan.

It was an easy, quick rise and I had plenty of time to bake and frost it before Todd was even out of bed!  A perfect Christmas morning treat.  I also made an accompanying apple compote.

Then it was Christmas movies, games, and lots of eating all day long...in our pajamas!  So relaxing.  But Christmas is over and we've slowly been taking the decorations down...much to the dismay of the pets, who love posing in front of the tree.

I've left a few things up that aren't explicitly Christmas, like this winter cross stitch I completed a few years ago.

The weather sure hasn't felt Christmasy.  It's been so warm and hazy.

There were a flurry of pictures on our township Facebook page when this warm front rolled in.  Here is a photo from our back yard!

It reached almost 70 degrees, but what a drop!  Just a few degrees shy of breaking our state record for biggest temperature variance in a 24-hour period.

We took advantage of the warm weather by hiking at one of our favorite winter spots, a nearby bog with a worn wooden pathway above it to help keep our feet mostly dry.

It was nice for a bit of spring weather - complete with our spring peepers chirping every day! - but hopefully we'll have more snow soon.

Have a great week!