The weather is bi-polar

I finished work on my presentation for the Revolution of Poets panel with Kate Rushin, Alta and Louise Bernikow—for The Revolutionary Moment conference March 27-29.  Our workshop is @ 2 pm on Saturday the 29th.  After all, I only have 15 minutes to fill.  Then I did my long interview for the Outspoken Authors book for PM Press.  Then I completed an interview almost as long for Trivia magazine.  Finally got through everything Thursday by noon and could at long last get back to poetry.  What a joy!  Wrote two poems Thursday afternoon and one today.The temperature keeps bouncing up to pleasant and plunging down to frigid.  Tuesday was gorgeous.  Thursday it snowed.  The ground was covered with a light coating of snow, maybe an inch and a half, and it’s still below freezing but the sun is brilliant and at least it’s less biting.  The poor lavender crocuses are taking a beating.  Brave spears of daffodils stick up through the snow.  In normal years, we’d have many small bulbs in bloom by now and buds in the early daffodils. The huge tree sized black pussywillow would be making fuzzy catkins. The one bright spot is the Chinese witch hazel down by the road, in full warm yellow bloom. A much prettier color than forsythia to my eyes.  But it should have come into bloom halfway through February, not the 2nd week in March.Today, Saturday, it’s much milder again.  The remaining snow is mostly melting except in the lower garden down by the road.  It showered a bit this morning but now it’s clearing.  What the weather people call partly cloudy.  I’ll get into the greenhouse today and do some thinning of the seedlings there.  Still too much cold weather coming to start planting as we normally would this week of March.I saw my local knee doctor and he called off the physical therapy because it was doing more harm than good.  As he said, exercise and more exercise is a PT’s answer to everything, and I need two knees to get around. She was working on strengthening the left operated knee, which is already quite strong and able, but the same exercises were deteriorating what remains of cartilage in the right untreated knee.  Yesterday I had X-rays of the right knee and I’ll see him in another week if the swelling has gone down.Puck, my Abby, loves cashmere sweaters.  He kneads them probably remembering his mother; Malkah who died a year ago December used to do the same thing, purring loudly.  Xena, the youngest and by far the biggest, has been hurling herself at the window in a happily vain attempt to get at the birds outside who are using the feeder.  She views them as little thieves encroaching on her territory and likely a tasty snack.Many birds.  We have two resident robins now, a pair; many goldfinches; still juncos; sparrows I haven’t gotten a good look at yet; many chickadees, wild turkeys, bluejays, mourning doves, downy woodpeckers, red bellied woodpeckers. a pair of cardinals, nuthatches. They excite Puck, Mingus and of course, Xena.  Sugar Ray is a pacifist and believes everybody including mice and ants are welcome to his world. Efi is too elderly to care, although in her youth, she was an avid mouser. It has been a hard winter so Woody fills the feeders every morning and they are empty by dark.  The raccoons have not been around.  I wonder if the coywolves got them.

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