In which spring is definitely sprung (at least temporarily)

For the last five or six days, we’ve had increasingly warmer days with sun. The first two were quite cold, but Monday and Tuesday a jacket was unnecessary. Today is a little cooler. I have been doing some work on my raised beds to clear them out for planting, if I decide to plant, and to make the flower beds look nicer and trim back plants I should have trimmed last fall if it hadn’t been raining every day. I have been unable to trim back one rosebush because it has been blooming the whole time. If I had done it in late fall/early winter, it may have been all right, but then we had some warm temperatures and the rose came back out. I don’t think I should cut it back when it has blossoms on it, even though they are pink instead of purple, which is what they’re supposed to be.

Some of my crocuses

My crocuses are all out, and most of my daffodils are out in the orchard, although I think I have one or two up here by the house that haven’t come out yet. My tulips have their leaves but not their flowers, yet. Down in the valley, trees are starting to have blossoms. It’s funny that all this blooming is going on, because we still had a little bit of snow on the ground a week ago Monday.

This week, I’ve mostly been doing the usual things, although Tuesday I skipped exercise class. Maja decided not to go because her cat died, poor kitty, so I decided to take a holiday from class. I have been so enjoying these lazy days when I have nothing in particular to do except some housework and taking care of Lukey.

On Saturday morning I had a vet appointment for Luke. His skin is all cleared up. We have been very careful to not feed him anything but his kibble. I’m hoping we have learned our lesson after his second outbreak. I spent the last two weeks cleaning the skin under his front legs and putting ointment on what appeared to be nonexistent runny bumps. I know they were there the day before his last appointment, but they certainly didn’t seem to be there as soon as I had to put the ointment on. I managed to find one bump, but it didn’t seem to be runny or open at all, maybe it was just a normal bump instead of an allergic one. But anyway, that is over. I noticed that when he started to have skin problems, his little pink tummy turned gray as did the insides of his ears. I thought it was just part of getting older, but now that his skin is cleared up, his tummy is pink again as are his ears.

He has been so lazy lately, so on Sunday since it was so nice, I took him to Moulton Falls Park for a walk. We didn’t go for a long one, because if I have no one to talk to, I get really bored, but it was about twice as long as his walk in the neighborhood, which is limited by the two short roads we have to walk on and our boredom with them. We were gone about an hour and a half, so I’m guessing we walked for an hour.

Then on Monday, we all decided to go for a ride. Originally, we were discussing driving to Half Price Books, a project of Wayne’s. I think it is nuts, because the nearest one is almost two hours drive away in Olympia, but he misses it. We have Powell’s books 45 minutes away, which is much better, but he doesn’t want to go to Portland. I think the local news gave the troubles downtown too much air, because when I’ve been there lately, it’s looked perfectly safe. Parking used to be problem, though. I haven’t had to try to park in that area lately. Anyway, when he saw how long it would take to get to Half Price Books (I’d been telling him, but he never listens to anything I say; he even insisted on putting it into our GPS to see how long the drive was, even though I had already done that with Google Maps), he decided not to go there.

We loaded ourselves in the car with no set destination, and he decided to drive out toward Sunset Falls. The way he talked about it (“There’s a road I’d like to go down”) was like he thought he’d never been there before, whereas he has actually been to Sunset Falls, one possible destination of that road, and all the way out to Camas, which is where you eventually can end up if you turn off Sunset Falls Road onto Dole Valley Road and just keep going when you get into the state and federal lands out that way. However, we have only ever stopped at Sunset Falls going the other way, so we decided to keep driving farther into the forest. I have driven on some really bad roads in the Mount St. Helens area, but I have never driven on roads as bad as these. They were covered with deep potholes that you could not avoid. The road follows the Lewis River to the northeast, and we saw some nice views of the river and were in beautiful country, but it wasn’t pleasant driving on the roads. There may be some nice hikes out there, though. However, after we’d been bumping up and down relentlessly for about 20 minutes, Wayne found a wide space in the road and turned around. I think we were gone about 1 1/2-2 hours. It was nice to be out in the sun, though.

My sister and brother told me that one day when she was taking him and his wife around to look at trailheads, they tried to find the way from Sunset Falls to the Tarbell Trailhead through Gifford Pinchot, but so much logging had been done that the roads didn’t match the map anymore and you couldn’t tell where you were. I actually am not sure how you could drive from one to another through the forest without going over a bridge near Sunset Falls that was clearly marked “no cars.” You used to be able to drive over that bridge, but you can’t now. The only other way would be to go back down Sunset Falls Road and drive out Dole Valley Road. I wondered if it could be possible that I wouldn’t be able to find my way around in there now, although Maja and I used to hike out there all the time. I was curious to see what it was like now, but we didn’t go that way.

And that’s about it for this week.