Catching up on Reportage

It's occurred to me that in my personal musings, I've been neglecting my silicon2tanana reportage, so here is some catchup.

Signs of Spring began to appear in early March, when the weather was still frigid. Giant horseflies began appearing in the house, but they were struggling and unable to fly, and promptly dropped dead. Where had they come from? Maybe they had frozen at the beginning of Winter and were thawing out now...

Then songbirds began appearing in the neighborhood, as well as rabbits and squirrels. Autumn thought it was great fun to chase them!

The campus reindeer herd are acting really cute, too, frolicking and binkying like happy bunnies!

Over the past week or so, we've had our first few days when temperatures came above freezing. It happened so quickly. Last week, I was still hoping for snow for the weekend, and this week it's patently obvious that Winter is WAY over. Snow has begun melting away, and in some places you can see grass underneath, grass that has been frozen all Winter. There hasn't been snow on the trees in a month or so, not counting that one morning, which Dan refers to as that "one last defiant act of Winter." And that promptly melted away that same day.

Our neighborhood is filled with mud. The (unpaved) roads themselves aren't too bad. There is quite a bit of clay and binder mixed into the roads, so while they are still sloppy, the water runs off them rather nicely. They also have lots of potholes, which I had forgotten about! Over the Winter, the potholes had filled with packed snow, and the roads kind of evened themselves out as people drove over them. Because it was snow packed with dirt, frozen solid, the surfaces were hard, but not slippery, and were very nice for walking/driving on. However, now that the thaw has come, we have mud and potholes. The trails and unmaintained roads are a whole different story, because they have no binder at all, and the soils are in their natural state. This means mud, mud, puddles, and mud.

It still gets below freezing at night, so this means that our morning runs are not so muddy (frozen mud is no problem), but it also means that puddles that have thawed during the daytime deceptively cover themselves with ice at night... perfect to stick your foot into and get a shoefull of mud!

And our snowman, he is melting by and by...