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!  :)

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!