New Year's day

I spent the first forty minutes of 2010 with my cats in their room. They had never seen fireworks and were a bit scared of the noise, especially the younger female. She hid in the dark underneath a bed between the bed and the wall and I could only see the pupils of her eyes shining green from there. Her two brothers were a bit braver but the mother seemed worried as well. She left her spot on the styrofoam box by the window and only returned there when I entered the room and began talking to them softly and reassuringly. I was so glad to see she felt safer at the sound of my voice! I stayed and talked to them until all the firework noise ceased. At the return of silence the young female almost immediately emerged from her hiding, and we all returned to our normal activities of that time of the night, that is, we soon went to sleep.

Upon waking up this morning I saw about three inches of snow on the ground and it was still snowing. I think I must have shoveled for about three hours. But I got everything done - the sidewalks on both sides of the property, the driveway and the path to the house. While it's not snowing anymore and it even looks like the snow is thawing, we have frost forecasted for the rest of the week, going down to as low as -16 C. It's certainly better to have those heaps of snow out of the way before they freeze.

The farm in early March

I visited the farm on Monday, almost two weeks ago from today. I was lucky to pick a warm and for the most part even a sunny day. It didn't look like the forecast was going to come true when I was leaving home - the sky was all cloudy and grey - but when I was approaching the farm it cleared to blue and sun came out.

The pics currently in the header and sidebar of my blog - a green neighbor's field and a hazel bush in bloom - were taken on that day. As well as the lime tree, old puff-ball and ferns. The vegetation is only beginning to show. It is always two or three degrees colder out there than it is in the city, so I wasn't expecting to see much green. But I actually found a couple of buds already opening into leaves or swollen and waiting for just a little more sun.

alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle)


tulips


nepeta (catmint)

The news I learned was that there had been a small fire in the neighbor's birch thicket and firemen arrived to extinguish it. Apparently, the branches of one of the trees were touching the power line and caught fire, which then spread a bit. There was no major damage, but as a result later during the week the village administration sent workers to clear the thicket and do an inspection along the power line. The line crosses our property almost midway in the east-west direction. I don't think they climbed over the fence because I didn't notice any branches down within the fenced area. This might be because last fall I cut down a single young maple which used to grow directly underneath the line, and there simply weren't any other trees left interfering with it. The village workers had, however, found a large pine branch, quite high up the tree, growing straight towards the line on the very eastern border of the property. They approached it from behind the fence, and cut it down.

old pine tree trimmed around the power line

Sunset in mid-March

sunset over neighbor's garden, 5:33 p.m.

Today's sunset was not as spectacular as the sunset in mid-February but it happened a full one hour later.

Even though the daytime temperatures are around 4 C/40 F, they go down to below 0 C/30 F during the night. It's been also very windy today, as well as yesterday. So last night I gave in and turned the central heating on, although initially I planned to leave it off for the night. I'll be trying to cut down from the current four to only two or three hours of heating in the evening before I go to bed, although ideally I'd want to switch it off entirely until next fall. I hope I will be able to do so in early April at the latest.

Sunset

I slept through much of this sunny mid-February day because I'm still fighting a cold from a couple of days ago. Taking aspirins three times a day, calcium, vitamin C and throat candy. I'm not going so far as to turn on the heat, though, so I decided to stay warm in bed instead.

I woke up just before 2 p.m. to discover blue skies and bright sun shining through my bedroom window. I took it slow from there, washing up and deciding how to get through the rest of the day without going outside to get some food (I'll be eating rice and chicken, there's also some couscous, barley and milk left so I should be fine). Then I watched the colorful sunset through my west facing window.

4:20 p.m.


4:30 p.m.

Pretty, wasn't it. I rarely get to see it because I work evenings and it used to be cloudy and grey - but warm - in the past week anyway. Tomorrow's supposed to be sunny as well, unfortunately, sun will come at a price of -4C / 25F during the day and -13C / 8F at night. The sunny, cold weather is forecasted to continue throughout the rest of this week.