Daylight savings time

Spring forward. Oof. I got up at 5:30 daylight savings time this morning with the only goal of staying awake until bedtime. I kept busy in the kitchen this morning, but as the afternoon is wearing on, I am wearing out. It does not help that today is dreary. It drizzled all morning and is now raining steadily. And I have a cold. I started last week with a sore throat. I tried very hard to convince myself it was allergies, but when the dry cough developed after two days, I knew better. By Friday, I was in the (hopefully) last stage of head-bursting sinus congestion. I am in the dispersive stage now, with viruses leaking from my nose. Folklore suggests that a cold is three days coming, three days here, and three days going. According to that schedule, I will feel better in a day or so. Let’s hope. Meanwhile, I am washing my hands a lot to minimize my threat to others.

Enough complaining. On the plus side this week, we welcomed back redwing blackbirds, robins, and killdeer. Yesterday wave after wave of sandhill cranes flew over, some so low and close to the house that I heard them with the windows shut. Spring is coming. The sandhills in particular give me hope for the future. When Aldo Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac, he worried that they were going extinct. Some things do get better.

I went for a walk Saturday when I finished grading papers. The air was filled with birds singing, frogs chirping, and the deep, rich smell of wet soil. The frog sounds were localized in a large puddle on the south end of the property. I looked for frogs in vain. They stopped chirping when I got close, and I saw nothing move. I think they might be wee tree frogs. Some day I’m going to go to the Conservation District’s workshop on identifying frogs and toads by call.

Not much shaking on the solar installation. Paul came out Monday to dig the trench for the pipe to hold the wires.

Paul with the trencher

The trench

The part from the garage to the chicken coop had to be dug by hand because of all the other wires and pipes below ground.

This stretch had to be dug by hand

When the trench was finished, Paul put in the pipe without running the wires through first. Terry confided to me at the end of the day that Paul was doing this the hard way. I reminded him that Paul had done this before and likely had a system.

The pipe in the trench

Paul came back Tuesday to fill the trench in. Terry was pressed into service to help with that too.

In other news, Terry discovered that the rabbits have chewed through the plastic deer fence and have been eating the bark off his trees. His first thought was to get a dog. Discussion ensued. I’m not much of a dog person, but I have no objection to an outside dog. The main problem with his plan, as I saw it, was that he didn’t want to get said dog “for a month or two,” which would then be followed by a great deal of time training the dog to stay on the property and patrol for rabbits at night. I questioned how much biorhythm shift could be expected of a naturally diurnal animal. Furthermore, this hardly seemed like a solution to the problem at hand, which was that the rabbits were eating the trees NOW. What was going to be left by the time he had this dog trained? There was also the issue of the dog being coyote bait. As far as that goes, why haven’t the coyotes eaten the rabbits? So many questions.

Toward the end of the week, Terry decided he didn’t need a dog after all. He would wrap the trees in burlap. We’ll see how that goes.

A burlap-wrapped apple tree inside the deer fence