The Jewish calendar is lunar and every so often it goes bonkers.  This year every holiday is earlier than apparently has happened since the 1890s.  The New Year of the Trees came in January, which is plain silly.  Pesach was March 25^th, which sucked.  We had just gotten back from an exhausting trip to Ohio with 3 gigs.  I had a lot of laundry and a lot of prep.  Monday I was cooking for 20 guests.  Then I led the seder.  In the middle, I almost passed out.  I was exhausted and dehydrated. Still the haggadah was as timely and beautiful as I could make it and everybody seemed to like the experience. I don’t look forward to Rosh Hashonah on the 4^th of September.  Where we have services isn’t airconditioned and since many summer people will still be around and our services are free, it will be jammed to overflowing. Enough bitching.  We are finally free of snow.  How beautiful the bare ground looks when we have been overwhelmed with one storm after another.  We have had crocuses for a month and the Chinese witch hazel’s golden blossoms since mid February, but now the later deep purple crocuses are  in bloom, the first of the intense blue scillas and the first daffodils.  Sunday Woody planted peas.  Today it’s spinach.  We grow lots of spinach and freeze a lot of it.  I hate freezing spinach as I get soaked and it’s a lot of work, but I do enjoy cooking with it in the winter when we have no fresh vegetables.  Spinach freezes perfectly. Since we got back, the cats have been all over us.  We both went out Saturday night, me to a friend’s birthday party and Woody to meet with a woman he had interviewed on his radio program, who was up with a friend from New York.  When I got in, they almost bowled me over.  The first two nights back, I had to sleep with four cats on top of me.  Now they’ve calmed down, but they still don’t like it if I leave the house.  Xena, the youngest and by far the biggest, has finally at a year and a half learned what a suitcase is and what it means, and for the first time, she got separation anxiety.  It’s worst for Sugar Ray.  Cat are pure emotion.  He’s the most emotional of all five of them.  The most attached. My birthday is Sunday, but we’ll celebrate it Saturday with Stephen and Dale. Stephen’s birthday is the 28^th, so we always try to make a common celebration. Woody will cook part of the meal and Dale will cook the other part.  I will sit back and enjoy.  I like to cook but enjoy a vacation from cooking every so often. Woody planted the peas last Sunday, spinach on Wednesday.  Friday I planted arugula, garden cress, white and red radishes, purple orach, red Chinese mustard and a bit of dill.   He is working on planting the leeks. i love leeks, so we grow a ot of them.  A lot of weeds spring up and need to be cleared before he can plow and put the seeds in.  I have also been clearing the herb beds.  it feels like spring, finally, a gardener’s spring, not the warm weather city people call spring.  We have early and late crocuses, those gorgeous deep purple ones – many, many of those and some that are striped lavender all the way to the gazebo and beside the house and on the kitchen terrace.  The daffodils are opening all over.  The deep blue scilla is beginning and  so is the pulmonaria.  Chervil has come up, having planted itself last year.  I started the maincrop tomatoes, 240 of them, this week.  I’ll thin out the weaker ones, of course.  I just fed everybody in the greenhouse, so my jeans stink of seaweed.  It’s spring, finally, finally. I wrote two short stories this week, very short ones, 4 pages each.  I have to start putting the ms. together for my short story collection.  It’s due to the publisher May first.  Not much time to get it sorted out and together.  But it felt good to get back to writing after the week of traveling and catching up. I’m working now on polishing them both. It started out shirt sleeve warm today but suddenly got cooler an hour ago.  I was uncovering the rosebushes with the hose.  I got soaked and very chilled.  I need a hot bath.