Spring Flowers

Well, the flowers aren't blooming outside yet, but I do have some blooming in the house. Here's a picture of a phalaenopsis orchid of mine that's in bloom.

Enjoy!

Snow

We got some wet and heavy snow here on Friday, and it's been lightly snowing on and off since then. Hopefully, it's going to end today...it sure doesn't seem like spring or Easter.

The estimate for fixing the seepage in our basement turned out to be less than what I thought it might be. I was quite happy with the proposal and the cost, so we're going to have the work done in April.

Yesterday, Richard, his daughter, her boyfriend, and I worked a good share of the day with ripping up the rest of the carpet, removing the tack strips, moving stuff, and taking off the baseboards on the walls. We also took the carpet/pad to the dump. It was good to get rid of that wet and stinky mess.

I also received the estimate for the outside landscaping. I think we'll go ahead and book that too.

Spring Update

We have another nice spring day today. The sun is shining beautifully, and the snow is continuing to melt. We still have several inches of snow covering most of the yard, but it is disappearing. There has been no new seepage in the basement since last Thursday. There are still some damp spots, but I think that's just from the water that first seeped in last week.

When I went home for lunch, there was carpeting and a carpet pad on the neighbors' porch and a crew of people were working at their house...it makes me wonder whether they had a similar problem with seepage...

Several times this week when I've walked Weezer early in the morning, I've seen deer in the neighborhood. On Monday morning, there was a small herd of six deer. They seem to be foraging in the yards where the snow has mostly melted. Buds haven't started to come out on the trees yet, and I haven't seen any signs in any one's yard yet of spring flowers, but I'm sure the deer are finding some tasty things to eat now that there's a lot less snow.

Spring Thaw

Last Thursday, we had a really good thaw. Unfortunately, the water decided to run towards the window well of one of our basement windows. By the time we got home from work, the carpet in the back room of the basement and the family room was soaked. So, I took Friday off work and moved all the stuff from those two rooms into our garage. It took a good share of the day to move stuff, but luckily there were only a few boxes that had wet bottoms. A lot of the stuff that was sitting right on the floor was in plastic bins...when Richard got home on Friday, we moved the remaining large items and then tore up the carpet in the family room. It was an awful soggy mess!

I also discovered on Friday the path the water had been taking. So, I took a shovel and dug a trench to keep the water away from the window well and the east side of the house. That seemed to stop the seepage.

Later this week, I'll be getting a couple of estimates for addressing the seepage problems in the basement. Hopefully, a landscaping solution is all that we'll need.

Spring is Approaching

It's nice to finally see some clear signs of the approach of spring. We've had some temperatures around 40 degrees the last few days, the snow is melting, and the male cardinals have started to be more territorial and aggressive towards one another. The cardinal that "owns" our yard has started to attack his reflection in our basement family room window again. He was doing it last spring when we first moved in, and it wasn't until just recently that he started doing it again...I just hope he and his mate are smarter about choosing their nesting site than they were last year. Last year, a predator found the nest just a few days after the chicks had hatched, so I hope that doesn't happen again this year.

Colds and Cold

I guess it's the season for more than just cold weather. Both Richard and I have colds now. We haven't felt like doing much more than what's absolutely necessary around the house. Hopefully, we'll both be over them soon.

Silly Church Signs

This one is really quite bizarre: "Lent: Time to calculate the final return of Jesus"

Huh? OK. I'll just pull out my calculator, enter some sacred numbers, and there it is!!! Hmmmm...that was just too easy. What's taking everyone else so long to figure it out???

The word "contemplate" instead of "calculate" would have made much more sense...

The Winter That Just Won't End!!!

It seems like winter is just never going to end. Here's what our house looked like yesterday (March 5th) after I shoveled snow from the last storm:

Dinner and a Concert

Last night we had dinner with one of our friends at a new restaurant here in town called HuHot. It's an all-you-can-eat Mongolian grill style restaurant. The food there was excellent and reasonable priced (approximately $15 a person). There was a very large variety of fresh meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces to choose from, and the service was great. We'll definitely go back.

Earlier in the day, I'd received a DVD order that I'd recently placed. One of the DVDs was "Ultimate Collection -- Fairport Convention". It's a two disc set, and I was quite anxious to see the second disc which is a recording of their 2001 concert at their annual Cropredy Festival. This particular concert included Ian Anderson as a guest musician (what could a person want more out of a concert than to see their two favorite bands/artists collaborating!!!)

The sound quality at the beginning of the disc was a bit questionable and it just wasn't balanced very good, but it got better after the first song. Ian Anderson joined with the band on a performance of "John Barleycorn" and "Locomotive Breath". The performance of "John Barleycorn" was truly amazing, and the version of "Locomotive Breath" was quite interesting compared with the way it's generally performed by Ian Anderson's band Jethro Tull. The other highlights of the concert were the songs "Tam Lin" and "The Hiring Fair" which are also several of my favorite Fairport songs...I can hardly wait to see the other Fairport DVDs that I bought!

Remember When

Yesterday, we met Richard's kids/grandkids at a small cafe in St. Charles, MN called "Remember When". Most of us had their breakfast buffet which was pretty typical but the food was good and very inexpensive. It was only $5.99 for the buffet which is really unheard of these days. We had a good time, and everyone enjoyed the food.

On the way there, it was actually nice to see patches of bare earth in the fields instead of snow. There had been a lot of melting of snow over the weekend, so it's starting to feel a little more like spring...now if we could just get the rest of that snow off the ground...

Another Silly Church Sign

The latest in the silly church signs reads "Part time work or religion won't support you". The reason why this one is so silly is because the tract that this church uses to bring in new members basically says that if you believe in Jesus and read the prayer that we've conveniently written and included for you, you'll be saved and then you can come and hang out with all the other saved people. In my opinion, this is about as part time as religion can get...POOF!!! You're saved!!!