YARD

A beautiful day in southeast Wisconsin today, without a doubt. Picture perfect.

With all the rain, it's been the first day possible to get outside and start getting the yard back in shape. I didn't mow today - probably tomorrow. But the yard 'stuff' came out -- the patio furniture / umbrella ... the plants and trees-in-pots ... the hammock ... et al.

Joelene began the tradition of 'fluffing up' the mulch around the yard, which will take her a week to get all that done - and planting fresh plants began.

I journeyed around the lot to see how many branches had fallen over the winter/spring seasons due to heavy snow and rains as well as continue my losing fight with the buckthorn (pictured at right). I have scars today on my hands, arms, shoulders, legs, feet and face as a result of those buggers. I also burned a boat load of brush in our fire pit and ended up getting a pretty decent burn on my right forearm from getting too close to the flames. It's 'par for the course' for me. It smarts, too.

It felt good to get underway with all that. It has seemed like a slow start this year, what with the cold weather and the long rains over the last couple of weeks.

The weirdness that happened today was that we found a nice-sized pile of small rocks in our backyard gathered at the foot of one of the large landscaping shrubs. We could not figure out how they got there. We have rocks on our driveway, so we thought it might have had something to do with the 4x4 that is used to shovel our drive in the winter, but these rocks were too far away from where we push snow to have been from that ... and besides, the rocks weren't even the same kind of rocks as what is on the driveway. They looked like the same ones that lay in our big basement window wells -- and this pile was close to those wells.

My best guess was that it was the handiwork of our scoundrel cardinal. We have a redbird that likes to fly down in our big window well and fly over and over and over and over into the window down there head-on. Crazy. Hundreds of times a day. We hear its little beak pecking on the window all the time. So I'm thinking this was the cardinal's sweet revenge for not being able to get in our basement - to fly little rocks up out of the window well and stack them beside a shrub -- and then, force me to have to pick them up one-by-one and toss them back down into the window well. Touche, redbird.

And be blessed.