Notes From Zone 4

There seemed to be enough open water to start the pond pump today, so I did. Unfortunately, the water smelled of decay, and as the ice melted I saw two dead frogs. This does not bode well for the fish. Unfortunately we really don’t know what we might have done wrong. Too many dead leaves?

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The snow is melting so fast that the yard is almost a pond itself. The driveway, too. Even with all that gravel, it’s not draining near fast enough. There are ruts along the edges from the cars going off of the driveway, too, which is bad. We need to come up with some sort of

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Usually, we have gold and purple finches all winter long, and they segregate themselves when eating the thistle feed at our feeders. But we haven’t seen a purple finch since last fall, and we missed them! But they are back. A flock landed in our yard today, and have been eating sunflower seeds rather than thistle, which is a bit strange for them. The ground has gotten so bare in just a couple of days that I can see daffodil foliage already. Amazing. The crocus shoots are out as well, though we still don’t have any actual blossoms. The pond is still frozen solid, however. But you can see the ice that covers it, rather than just the snow. Soon we’ll see if the fish survived the long winter.

We went to the Keene Flower Show today, and enjoyed pretending that it was spring. It was pretty crowded for a Friday afternoon, but not so crowded that it wasn’t fun. We took Ginny with us, and she seemed to enjoy it as well. The only thing I bought for the garden were lily bulbs.

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Things seem to be coming together, albeit slowly. I finally got a hold of someone clueful at Godaddy. It seems that the .ORG registry was just recently yanked from the slimy hands of Verisign (details on request. Countersuit if Verisign harasses me.) In the process, Chuck seems to have fallen on the floor, at least

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The sounds outside are wonderful right now. The temps have been up in the 60s and 70s, which is almost unheard of here in Zone 4 in March. It’s been so warm that the snow is melting very, very fast, which means the creek out in the middle of the swamp is very full. We can hear it from the house, and Frank’s been out on the balcony taking many pictures of his favorite view. We’re seeing bare ground here and there. For a while, the only thing we could see was the top of the stone walls, and things like that. But at this point, there are serious areas of bare ground. Sopping wet bare ground, but bare ground nonetheless. How very exciting!

The snow is retreating, I’m happy to report. The temps were in the mid-60s today, and it no longer sounds like it’s raining all the time with the snow dripping from the roof. Big blue skies today, contrasting with the still snow-covered ground and warm temps gave us spring fever in the worst way! On

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Webalizer has been being it’s usual pain here at the vast Richards web empire. (Sorry too much news-speak this week). Besides all the usual failures to run with a terse “I won’t” left in the log, I’ve been getting the same statistics on all the sites, something that’s obviously wrong. Well, I’ve got it set

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The Double Blue Picotee that I started seems to be doing pretty well. I seem to be seeing the start of “true leaves” on these guys, not just the seed leaves. What I don’t know about these is how I should treat them. Do you pinch them off when they get leggy, even if they

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We discovered something cute this week: Lisa’s Handspring visor will only hotsync if it is plugged into the bottom USB port of her Thinkpad. We haven’t tried serial, but IR doesn’t work either. The machines see each other but the Palm software doesn’t run. However if you plug it into the correct port it works

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