The First Day Of Spring

Well, this is a day that's always a happy one for me, when spring gets here.

Break out the bunnies! And the crocuses! And the feeling that newness is in the air!

It's been a tough winter, very tough. And expensive for snow removal, even if the heating bill has been about average or a little under the usual. The sun, though, turns out to be the best snow remover ... and it doesn't cost a thing, if you're willing to wait for it to get around to it.

Yippee! We're there! Officially!

All The Sounds

Now that it's spring I have the window opening. We're in that no man's land between winter and spring when it's too warm to have the furnace on and too cold to have the air conditioner on. So in that little strip of time, we open the window.

Opening the window and having it open, it's amazing all the noise out there. There's the obvious noise, trucks and cars going by. Then the other stuff, children screaming. They're not in trouble. They just like to scream, I guess. I can hear a dog right now, yapping off in the distance. Then there's just ambient noise, maybe bugs, maybe it's just noise in my head.

All the time -- often anyway -- I'm hearing mourning doves. It always puts me into a memory of my childhood when I used to lay in bed and listen to the mourning doves. I'm amazed that they haven't forgotten by now their familiar coo. It's always the same, right down to the precise timing between coos. Amazing.

Other birds are out there tweeting up a storm too. And an occasional crow. Speak of mourning doves, as I'm typing this I can hear one. Pretty soon it'll be time for a train.

Donated Some Books

I have it firmly in mind, probably because of spring, that I need to do some downsizing. I wrote about my clutter a few days ago and someone actually commented, telling me they would sell it for me. I don't want to do that.

Today I looked at it again and it was all still there. Plus, there's a place going to have a book sale for a worthy cause, coming up. So I loaded up three empty boxes and hauled them over. Must have been a couple hundred pounds. I'm never going to get to these books anyway. And some of them were even books I bought at the same book sale last year. Still in the box.

It looks good to see the empty space. But I still have lots more to get rid of. There were some in those areas that I spared. Including an old Boy Scout manual. In case I need to learn how to do a knot, which I don't know many of. Also a falling apart paperback called "The Hoods" by Harry Grey. Looks like one of those good old pulp novels from the '50s.

Downsizing is going to be nice ... as long as spring cleaning fever holds out.