January in April

Gardening in Montana requires fortitude, and this is why no one puts plants out before the end of May:

We went from 60 degrees and sunny on Thursday to this. The snow started coming down as I was cooking up bacon and eggs for breakfast. By lunchtime, we had five inches on the ground. It warmed up into the low 40s by mid-afternoon, which turned everything into a slushy mess. It is 22 outside right now, which means that slushy mess is now frozen.

I said to the husband that this was more snow than we’ve gotten in the past three months. I wish it had come in January or February. Back then, I didn’t have chicks in the brooder or plants in the greenhouse. Spring chores are harder when it’s winter outside. The chickens were very unhappy yesterday. They don’t like to go out to the chicken yard when there is snow on the ground.

It is what it is.

The husband installed the new dishwasher yesterday morning. It cleans really well. My only complaint is that the lower rack has dish guides installed at right angles to each other rather than lined up in one direction. I cannot put the drip pans from my stove in this lower rack, so I am keeping the lower rack from the old dishwasher and swapping it out when I need to wash large or long items.

Neither of us had a terribly productive day yesterday. I cleaned the kitchen once the husband was done in there, but I spent the rest of the day sitting and reading or embroidering. I think we are still recovering from the auction. The husband came down with a cold this week (probably caught at the auction) and is pretty miserable.

Of course, now that I can’t work in the garden, my sew-jo has taken a hike. I should take advantage of this time to finish quilting the Blue Thistle quilt and to put the borders on the Sunbonnet Sue quilt and get that one basted. I will see my college roommate in June, so if I have the quilt done by then, I’d like to be able to show it to her. (I will ship it back to her.) Her brother lives in Moscow, Idaho, which is just south of Coeur d’Alene. Her brother and her husband have a bike trip planned for June. She messaged me the other day to say they were flying in to Spokane a few days early and would drive over to see me, but I did her one better—my mother and I are going to Alaska in June to visit DD#1, and it works out perfectly for me to spend a day or two with my roommate and her husband in Spokane before meeting my mother when she flies into Seattle.

I’ll find my sew-jo somewhere. I am nothing if not disciplined. And it’s a lot like writer’s block. Sometimes you just have to fake it until you make it. I am glad to be working on the embroidery projects again, though. I worked on my embroidered chicken project last night. It’s not to the fancy embellishment stage yet, so I have nothing interesting to show you.

The annual spring invasion of the forest animals has begun in earnest. We have a female flicker who has decided that the metal ridge cap of the house would be a great place to try to find bugs. (The husband reminds me that bird brains are not very large.) She starts up at 7 am every morning. It sounds like someone is jackhammering our roof. We have not figured out how to dissuade her. This has been going on for about two weeks now. There is also a very persistent, very opinionated stellar jay who lets me know that he is unhappy when his daily ration of cracked corn is late. The male turkeys seem to have moved on and left the females here by themselves. (No doubt the females are relieved.) I need to get my hummingbird feeders filled and hung up, although if I were a hummingbird, I would stay south for a few more weeks yet.

No bears yet, although we’ve heard they are out.