Changing My Habits

I  have gotten into a rut not blogging very regularly the last few months.  It has to be a habit or routine to write every day or so, otherwise the days tick by and no writing gets done.  Today I hope to renew my habit of posting more often.

Springtime in Nebraska – almost.  It has been "off and on" spring and winter this whole month of March and I am really ready for spring to arrive for good.  This photo was taken the 3rd of March.  Notice there is no snow and there are geese in the air.  Here where we live in Nebraska is a major flyway for migrating geese so we see millions each spring and fall.  I never tire of looking for them in the air and in the fields resting and eating.  Look closely or click on the photo and see that the specks in the photo above are lines of geese flying.  We get mostly Snow Geese here and once in a while a few Canadian Geese, plus quite a few ducks along the river and ponds too.This photo was taken from my sewing room window looking over the garage roof at the flying geese.  A friend who lived away from here most of her life has come back to live part time and remarked the other day that the geese must have been confused because they were flying south and some were going east, etc.  I told her they tend to come and stay a while flying to different fields then one day they are all gone.  They don’t just fly north but every which way while here.  I think since we have the fields with some dropped grain from last fall it is a good place for the geese to feed and build up their reserves again for the next leg of their trip north for the summer.

It was wonderful to see the geese and the bare ground where the snow had melted but I forgot….this is Nebraska and things change quickly.This is what we woke up to on March 10th….a blizzard that was dumping a lot of snow and really blowing so it was drifting into big piles too.
This is one of the few windows we could see out of as the first snow that came during the night was very wet and with the wind was plastered to all but the north windows where it froze and stuck.Late in the afternoon the snow stopped falling and the wind died down a bit so it was time to clear the sidewalks and deck.  This is a view of my sewing room window (big bow window) with the almost 6 foot drift building up in the yard.  The deck had almost been covered with a drift and I had about 3 feet of snow to scoop off. It was tempting to leave it but since it is the way to our back door and we need to use it I slowly scooped and lifted the shovel over the deck railing to get is cleaned.  You might want to know why John was not doing the scooping by hand instead of me….he had a whole yard of drifts to clear with the tractor so we could get in and out with our vehicles and had to take care of the livestock as well.  His job took him the entire day so I don’t mind the scooping, even though it is hard work.  Besides it is good exercise to burn some extra calories.

OK…now it is March 15th, just 5 days after this big snowstorm.  The temperatures were mild all week and the snow melted real quickly.  My friend and I drove to the Homestead National Monument in Beatrice, NE to hike and see the sights and this is what the trails looked like.It got into the upper 70s or low 80s that day and I even got sunburned on the back of my neck.  Isn’t that amazing.  It was absolutely the most beautiful day with a slight breeze and we had a picnic outside for lunch.  The next day it was in the 30s again….changeable, changeable Nebraska!The above photo was taken this morning (March 23, 2013) from my family room looking out to the driveway and cattle lot where you can see a few of the replacement heifers.  Notice anything?  Yes, it is snowing again!  The flakes this morning are large and fluffy and before you might think we have GIANT snowflakes I want to assure you that the ones stuck to the window are not real snowflakes.  (As if you couldn’t tell.)  At Christmas our grandkids and I cut snowflakes from coffee filters and I used a kids glue stick and stuck some to this window.  Last week when it was so nice I was thinking of taking them down but today they look just right in front of the real snow. 

Maybe tomorrow will be sunny and warm….who knows.  Sunday is Palm Sunday and it should be spring, right?

Until Later,
Lynn