Spring Wins!!

It has clearly taken awhile, but this weekend spring finally beat out the winter and it was a gorgeous victory. Our hats off to the tenacity and determination of winter's fight, but in the end we must now salute the victor.  We had a busy romp for sure and with our socks stowed safely indoors we felt the cool moistness of the outside in almost all our activities.  Merrick and I replaced the old hops trellis with a new system and we had a great fire from the old pine.  Merrick also decided it was time to put the fear back into the squirrels and took it upon himself to set up some squirrel traps.  We did catch two, quite quickly, but it was solely a catch and release operation this weekend, a fair warning if you will.  Friday night was a lot of alternations of backyard baseball to backyard kickball until Merrick and I called it quits for the evening and Sophia headed off to the gymnastics open gym with a friend.  Her curfew more for my bedtime than concern for her making any poor judgments.  Saturday found us busy with a photo-shoot for Sophia's dance team and their upcoming recital and Merrick and I were off to get all the new year's information on soccer coaching.  We did bale a little early given the pull of such nice weather and went home to mulch all the flower beds and then head out to do some fishing.  Accompanied by our friends we tossed every bait combination we could think of including marshmallows and shrimp to entice something to bit, but in the end we were satisfied watching the clouds drift by and the warm breeze on our face and naked feet.

 

 Stilts and  whittling and plenty of spring time promises of summer to come.  Saturday night even found us in sleeping bags under the stars curled up around the camp fire.  WIth no bugs and no reason to sleep inside we figured we would just stay out there all night.  Brusier woke up about 2am and had trouble going back to sleep and my old bones were groaning at the ground so I didn't fight the idea of an actual mattress, and we headed back in.

 Sunday required an ice cream lunch for our first Zesty's trip of the new season. We then headed out for another seasonal hike.  We did come across a couple of other hikers that were very concerned for our bare feet.  The kids and I scoffed a little and figured we weren't going to have soggy muddy shoes/socks to worry about nor would we be spreading invasive species seeds all over the land scape.  The late afternoon was rounded off with some backyard reading and chess in the warmth of the sun.  Just an amazingly perfect and rejuvenating weekend....a spring cleaning for our insides if you will.