i hate when husband is right

Take a guess as to when this photo was taken:

There’s not a lot of snow out there. October? One of the first snows of the year?

Perhaps late December or even January after everything has melted?

Or do you take the long shot? The one that’s gonna pay off big and say late March, almost April. The time when the rest of the US has warm weather and the flowers are blooming and people are wearing shorts and all their pretty warm weather clothes? Yup, you’d be rolling in the dough right now.

I hate this state sometimes. Especially when Husband is right. (He said there would be one more snow.) But the snow didn’t stop the cats from begging to go outside:

Do you see the green jingle bells on the door? They were Christmas decorations from about four years ago. I just never got around to removing them. Wow, I’m pathetic. I dare you to beat that.

But when it is cold and snowy out, what is there to do other than take a nap?

Doesn’t she look all comfy and warm on those white blankets? Wait? Blankets do you say? Perhaps if we zoom out a little bit:

Well, thank goodness it’s not my clean white shirt she’s sleeping on. That’s what Husband gets for being right all of the time.

I missed it

Spring was here and I missed it. I didn’t go outside or do any gardening at all.

That’s how I feel about Spring in MI. One day it is in the 60s and the next it is in the 30s. The only saving grace is that I’ll be able to have one last fire and use up all of the wood. One of my goals this summer is to seal the garage floor. The more stuff that we can use up is less that we have to move outside!

I’m thinking about moving the Missy outside. She has been the biggest pestilence since we got back from Salt Lake City! Thursday morning, she was crying outside the bedroom door before the alarm clock even went off. I don’t remember Friday morning, but Husband said that someone was banging on the door this morning too. I’m convinced it was her. She’s either lonely or awfully hungry. But it is nice to have a cat on your lap every once in a while so we live with it.

We’re entering the last stretch of the semester. Only five more weeks to go. In those next five weeks we have two more tests, a poster session, a lab final, one thesis to submit, a research symposium at the college, a paper to submit, hordes of wanna be organic students that are freaking out because they can’t get into the class that they want!!, two bridal showers and oh yeah, class.

Spring semester is nice because it means warmer weather is on the way and a one week Spring Break, but it is so full of stuff to do before graduation. I much prefer the Fall Semester when it is a little slower and more laid back. There is still PLENTY of time to get those results for the ACS meeting, for the thesis for the poster session. Students haven’t yet heard from all the grad schools or med schools or dental schools and there is still hope in the air. There is still one more semester to take those classes they want and no good-byes lurking around the corner. The final decision of what you are going to do over the summer is so far away and proposals are just a twinkling in your eye.

But as busy as the Spring Semester is at work, it is a joy in the garden. I saw my first crocus today, all purple and hiding in the grass. More and more hyacinth are starting to peek out of the mulch. I’m starting to get the itch to get back outside and start cleaning up the yard. I keep telling myself: Only five more weeks!

Mother nature was waiting for February

It’s been COLD up here in the frozen tundra of MI. And when I say frozen, I’m not exaggerating. There has only been two or three days in January that the temperature has been above freezing. But the house is heated and when I have the stove going, it can get positively hot in the den.

Funny story about the cold. When I moved to North Carolina for graduate school, my uncle gave me a lined Gortex jacket because he didn’t need it in Texas. I only wore it once the entire time that I lived there and I nearly died of heat exhaustion the day that I did. I honestly thought that there was no place that ever got cold enough that anyone would need a coat that warm, except maybe Antarctica. HA!!

When I got to Michigan, the first winter I pulled that coat out and nearly froze to death. That was the first indication that I might have made a mistake in choosing my new home. I suffered through the first winter but upgraded to an Eddie Bauer coat the next. This one actually covers my butt, which I didn’t think could get as cold as it did.

But even with all of that, it usually doesn’t get so cold in MI that I feel that I need to take a photo of the thermometer in the car. Until two weeks ago.

That’s right, it was *3* F out there. Thankfully I have the new car that has heat. I might have died in the old Neon. I loved my Neon but it was not built for the tundra. If I drove faster than about 45 mph when it was less than 35 F, the air cooled the engine block off and I didn’t get heat in the car. (There’s another funny story about that one.)

It gets worse though.

Not a minute later, the temp dropped to 0!!

WTF?!? I called Husband and told him my thermometer was broken; there is a dash in front of the number.

Honestly, I get it. It’s cold. Enough!

Now she’s just showing off. And I thought that was it. Seven degree drop in five minutes of driving. I cranked the heat up one more notch and drove a little faster.

But it didn’t end.

MINUS FIVE DEGREES. Doesn’t life stop when it gets that cold? I swear that I saw deer with sweaters out there.

That was January 19th or so. Look at what it did today:

Yup, 40 degrees outside! Snow melted! The sun was shining! Cats and dogs sleeping together!

I think Mother Nature was just waiting for February. I know how she feels. January is kind of a crappy month. It’s the first month of the year and we’ve broken all of our resolutions. What was supposed to be shiny and new turns out to be the same old dented year, just with an extra number. The days are short and everyone misses the sun.

But February! You don’t have to live up to the hype of the new year anymore. You can slip back into the comfortable sweats of the old routines and no one gives you dirty looks. Winter is still around up here, but it’s starting to pull out of the southern states and we can live vicariously through our relatives.

But Mother Nature is fickle. She’s not ready to give up the goods just yet. Wednesday, the high is supposed to be 13 F. Just to show that she can.

The difference between biologists and chemists

Well, there are lots of them. But the one that I’ve noticed most on this trip is the willingness of biologists to touch just about anything.

Personally, I like to follow the “see if the person dies” rule about touching things. I’ll let someone else touch all the nastiness and then follow them around for a couple of days. If their fingers don’t fall off or develop blisters, then maybe I’ll think about poking things.

Urchins for example. I finally went to the “touchy feely” tank today and pet an urchin. I had to wait a couple of days to make sure that everything was OK, but I finally did it.

But take for example this:

What does that look like to you? To me, it looks like someone blew their nose.

Would a self respecting chemist reach down and pick up something that looks like a ball of snot? No. But the biologists on this trip will pick up anything. Pinching crabs, globs of snot, balls of alga. They even started having alga fights.

Just so ya know, it’s called a nudibranch, or a sea hare. They’re harmless, but don’t they look gross? If I saw this sitting in a tide pool, I would thing something had died!

Anyway.

The weather’s taken a turn for the worse here in sunny FL:

But I have to admit that this is my favorite kind of ocean weather. I like it when it is cold and windy and the seas are choppy. There’s no expectation that you have to get in. You can just sit, bundled up, and stare at the waves. I’m a fairly strong swimmer and I like the water, but I don’t naturally gravitate to the water anymore. Twenty years ago, that was different. I was a water baby. I could play in the water all day but not anymore.

I don’t know what happened. I like to be by the ocean. I like to hear the waves and watch the tide roll in and out, but I don’t feel the need to jump in and swim. I have a healthy respect for the sea and everything in it. I don’t want to disturb the balance and have something eat me or sting me.

Later in the day, we went to the tide pools and it was pretty sunny and the wind had died down. The sediment was all stirred up so there was no danger of having to get in the water again.

A White Christmas….

whether we wanted it or not!

There was about 8 inches of snow on the ground today. Thankfully, I could stay inside by the fireplace, avoiding work and playing with my yarn.

Husband was not so lucky. He had to go to work. I understand why he had to go, there was really no way around it.

But I don’t understand why my neighbors in particular felt the need to get stuck in the road in front of the house. The guy across the street cleared his driveway and part of the road in front of his house and tried to pull out in his big ‘ole hoopty car. Needless to say, with about six inches on the ground at that point, he fishtailed around for a few minutes and then pulled back into the driveway and closed the garage up. I didn’t see him again.

The next door neighbor had to go out to the grocery store so his daughter could go shopping for Christmas baking. I helped push his car so he could get started and on his way to the store.

Seriously, people. You knew that snow was forecast, and butt-loads of it. (A butt-load is a technical term. It is smaller than a crap-load but larger than buckets.) Couldn’t you have run all of these errands the day before?

And speaking of the day before; only 8 to 10 inches were forecast, not 3 feet. You didn’t need to go out and buy 6 gallons of milk. While they are taking a long time to plow the roads, everyone will be able to go to the mall tomorrow and do their Christmas shopping. We’re not snowed in for a week.

And if you are snowed in, you probably don’t need a full tank of gas. I couldn’t believe the lines at the gas station yesterday! You’re not going anywhere, except maybe the road in front of your house where you’ll get stuck. And you don’t even need to start the car for that.

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Photos later.