Spring

Earlier this week I mowed the lawn for the first time this season. The mower was a little cranky after being made to sit quietly all winter in a cold storage shed but it was finally convinced to start. At this early juncture, my lawn is mostly comprised of tufts of grass in a sea of dead brown material and an assortment of weeds. But all of it needs a weekly trim regardless of affiliation.

The reward in these early days of spring is the sweet fragrance of hyacinths that permeates my backyard and entertains my nose if I as much as glance in their direction. They don't stay around nearly long enough but their scent is a clear message that the growing season has begun.

Ping-o-Matic Won't Ping

I have tried using a free service called Ping-o-Matic to send out pings to a raft of directories anytime I update one of my blogs. I know the key word here is that it's free and I shouldn't complain, but here it comes anyway. The service is extremely unreliable. In my experience, about 95% of the time, Ping-o-Matic takes a few minutes to spin its wheels, jams up, then blames the mess on me by delivering an error message that says "Slow Down Cowboy" and tells me that my last ping was only a few minutes ago. Really? Who pinged you guys over at Ping-o-Matic? I didn't, neither did any automatic system on my blogs. So don't you really mean to send me an error message that says, "Oops, our site is down ... again."

To get your pings out quickly and reliably, try Oddpath's service. It's also free. But unlike Ping-o-Matic, Oddpath really does work.

The Genie

My daughter and her husband had a baby shower a week or so ago. This is their first child and my first grandbaby, so we are all pretty excited. Check out the post about our ultrasound experience.

The best gift they got at the shower, in my view anyway, was a diaper genie. I had not seen nor heard of one until the shower. It's ingenious. Kind of like the biohazard containers you see in hospitals and doctors' offices.

Just drop in the dirty diaper and it is locked up inside the device so the smell, the mess, the sight is gone! Wow.

We can send men to the moon and we can dispose of dirty diapers. Baby technology sure has come a long way in the last twenty-five years.

First Peek

Yesterday, I got a chance to see my first grandbaby for the very first time. I don't want to sound like some wayward grandparent, so let me clear that up by saying I saw her with a 3D ultrasound. She's due to arrive somewhere around March 18 but I welcomed the opportunity to take a sneak peek.

The nurse pointed out all these wonderful and amazing features - nose, fingers, big toe. I couldn't see any of it. Nothing. Everyone else in the room seemed to, or said they did. But I didn't. Oh, I tried. Strained my eyes, squinted, tilted my head, but all in a vain effort to see what they saw.

Soon I discovered that 3D ultrasounds are a lot like those pictures you see on the comics page in the Sunday paper. You have to stare at the meaningless series of images, really concentrate, then Bam! A 3D picture suddenly appears. And my little granddaughter did, too.

She covered her face with her tiny hands for a while, then did a "peek-a-boo" tease, and we finally saw her chubby little cheeks and her beautiful little face. At one point, she even treated us to a very clear, discernible smile.

Now, people will tell you that babies do not smile. They say it's just gas. But when did you ever smile when you had gas? No, my friend, babies are fresh from God. How can they help but smile?

Thanksgiving Weekend

Besides eating until I nearly burst, I went fishing over the the Thanksgiving holiday. The White River - my favorite spot on the planet. It was still deer season in Arkansas, and there was only one camp at the landing - a deer hunting party. The rest of the river was mine.

It was cold, maybe 40 degrees, and a bit windy but the fish were biting well. The river was very low and the water clear as gin. I caught a limit in less than forty minutes and played catch and release after that.

The rest of the weekend was business. I worked on a website design for my client in the UK and then there was the business of putting up Christmas lights, which I accomplished between rain showers.

Another Winter Storm

Well, we're bracing for another major ice storm. This one has the potential to be worse than the storm we experienced a few weeks ago. Already, over half an inch of ice has fallen. The trees are coated and I can hear limbs breaking outside. The precipitation is actually coming down as rain, but it is freezing on contact. Roads are clear, but even that is expected to deteriorate as the night goes on.

I put wood on the deck in the event power is lost and we have to resort to heating with the fireplace. The ground was soft and wet which made it tough to push the wheelbarrow, and the icy rain soaked my jacket and shirt. Plus, the gutter was overflowing from a leaf jam so I had to pull out the ladder and clean that mess. Very difficult to find a place where the ladder did not sink in and when I did get up to the gutter, my hands froze almost instantly from trying to clear the jams. All is well now, though.

Tomorrow and Sunday are threatening to be even worse than today for ice accumulation along with snow accumulations on Sunday. Could be an interesting weekend. I was planning to work on the web site design improvements, and will if the power holds out.

Christmas Cheer

If you had no other way to tell what time of year it was, you could nearly pinpoint the date simply by observing Springfield traffic. An alternative method would be to visit the mall or any of the large box stores in town. In either case, the most accurate determination of time would be to have established a reference point a few weeks ago, then make a more recent observation for comparison.

Traffic has thickened significantly, no debate about that. I have a forty mile commute to Springfield and pass a growing line of headlights each evening as I head home. No doubt they are the automobiles of Christmas shoppers making yet another trek to the city's shopping meccas because they still haven't found that one "wow" gift or because Aunt Mable FedEx'd something unexpected so they are obliged by the rules of return giving to find something that Aunt Mable needs even though she did not originally make the cut for the shopping list.

It's not so much the growth in traffic that indicates the season as it is the courtesy level of the drivers involved. Just today I saw someone stop short of an intersection to allow two cars to pull out - one going to the right, the other to the left. Neither driver as much as served up the flash of a palm to say "thanks." Instead they seemed to act as though they were merely collecting on a debt already owed. People are always shifting lanes, cutting others off or generally behaving rudely on the road, but this time of year sure heightens the activity. Lip read a few drivers today and you'll understand what I mean.

It's the same in stores. I used to be a Christmas Eve panic shopper, but have become one of those very organized types that has everything purchased and wrapped before the second week of December. I was in Target a few weeks ago and everyone was friendly. I was checking out the DVD's near the checkouts when a lady offered the unsolicited advice that the same movie cost $2 more at K-Mart and that Target had the best priced DVD around. Later, another lady waiting in the checkout line next to me asked about the merchandise I was holding and I sold her on buying the same thing (if you're reading this, Target, I'll take the standard 15% commission).

Today, it's not like that. I was in Target just a few days ago (not Christmas shopping) and it was like warfare. Wild eyed and frenzied, people bulldozed their carts into aisles without stopping, plowing ahead like tanks ignoring anyone in their paths. Few people spoke except to stammer out the next item on the list or argue about what color sweater to get for dear old Aunt Mable, whose dearness quotient had fallen off considerably since the FedEx guy was at your house. Shaken, battle-weary veterans of Christmas wars, they are. Unable to accept defeat, they push ahead with their mission, refusing to accept the inevitable purchase of Simon gift cards to close out their lists, and for which they will pay dearly with their time as they reach the gift card conclusion only after everyone else has done the same thing and they all find themselves waiting ... waiting ... in the same long checkout lines they have had to endure for days.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but shoppers take note. All this will grow worse before it gets better. The lines will get longer. The fuses will get shorter. The nervousness will grow. But the silver lining is that come Christmas morning, the only thing that will matter is the look on the faces of loved ones when the paper is torn away and the gift illuminates their smiles. It's too bad that it only takes about 15 minutes to tear open what it took about 3000 minutes to buy and wrap. But, chances are, we'll do it all over again next December.

Christmas Lights

Got the Christmas lights finished while the weather was still warm. It was 65 degrees or better this past weekend when I did most of the work. The final touches were completed on Monday night while temps remained near 60 degrees.

I'm glad of it. It was 71 today before the cold front moved through. Within an hour it was in the mid-fifties and still falling. Predictions are for freezing rain, sleet and snow, maybe even thunder-snow, for the next couple of days. All that plus bitter cold air temperatures and wind chills near or below zero make me happy to report I'll be reading a book in front of the fireplace this weekend. Or working on YourPanorama.com.