jimsjournal
The season keeps changing -- 04/17/04

We have been through about every kind of weather imaginable this month, including heavy rain, light rain, cold rain, snow mixed with sleet and rain, brief tastes of mild sunshine, windy days, strong gusting gale force windy days, all mixed up in the space of not much over two weeks. And at last we are getting some mild spring days, sunny and in the fifties today (13° or 14° C), maybe into the sixties tomorrow (around 17° C) and Monday might even hit eighty inland (26° C) (although a bit cooler than that here along the coast). It is going to be brutal for the running of the Boston Marathon on Monday with that kind of heat, especially for everyone who has been training in colder temperatures.

This has been another busy week at work, the third week in a row to hit fifty hours. (Oh, okay, I exaggerate, the week before I only put in forty-nine and a half hours.) Still, I escaped long enough to donate blood on Wednesday. They gave me a coffee mug because this brought me to three gallons of blood. That's three gallons since I moved to Rhode Island, but I'm closing in on the four or five gallons that I gave when living in upstate N.Y. Actually, I'm very pleased with this because I used to donate two or three times a year and I've been pushing to do it more often and, if I subtract out those two one-year periods where I wasn't eligible to donate because of periodontal bone-grafts, this means I've brought my average up to almost four times a year since moving to R.I.

I am really tired right now -- a lot of digging in the garden today -- and now I'm not only tired, I've got a few aching muscles. Ah, but now the vegetable garden is all ready for planting and tomorrow Jill and I plant to start that. I suppose the snap peas maybe could have gone in a couple of weeks ago but we had pretty rotten weather then and not only have we had lots of rain, it has been cold, almost every night into the thirties, even into the low thirties -- frost -- so the peas aren't going in until tomorrow. (They would have gone in today but I ran out of energy.) So tomorrow the peas get planted and probably most of the other seeds we have as well -- various kinds of lettuce and squash and carrots and radishes. And beans and spinach. Later on in the spring I'll probably go to a garden center and buy some tomatoes and probably look for some parsley and maybe some basil. (Chives are a perennials and mine have been up since March -- in fact, I've already used some of this year's growth.)

Another cute cat picture.

Tiger just can't resist an open box. He's just like a little kid, thinks every cardboard box around must be for him to play in. He enjoys empty paper bags from supermarkets, too -- but those he tends to shred... boxes he just climbs in and sits there, looking around, king of all he surveys.

Okay, that's it. I really need to get to bed. It's time to post this and send out an e-mail to the notify list. Lots more yard and garden work to do tomorrow.



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