Spring has officially come a close, astronomically speaking. Here are some noteworthy events from the season past:
We were eating dinner one evening, looking out the bay window, when a small fox trotted out from the side of our house. We'd seen him once or twice before, always disappearing around the front of our neighbor's house. This time he stuck his head into the neighbor's wood pile and came out with a big egg in his mouth. He took it to the opposite end of our yard, buried it among some flowers, and went right back to the wood pile for another egg. This one he buried in the yard across the street and then came back for egg number 3, which went in a different neighbor's yard. He went back and forth, burying eggs in various yards (I think we wound up with 3 in our yard). We counted 10 eggs in all. At this point Wendy connected a few dots and remembered we always see a duck with about 10 ducklings in the pond each year. Probably not this year, we thought! It turns out we did still see a mama duck with 9 or 10 ducklings this year, so who knows if they were duck eggs the fox found.
Another annual event we always see is the migration of a giant turtle across our yard. Apparently she lays eggs in a neighbor's back yard (not one of the same ones the fox buried eggs in), and then in a painstakingly slow process, migrates back to the pond, always across our yard. And somehow we manage to see her every spring. The neighbor always comes out when she gets close to the road and shepherds her across. This year I shot some action-packed, jaw-dropping video of the event:
Finally, we bought some patio furniture a few days ago, and today spent part of the afternoon sitting out on our deck reading (and playing Nintendo DS). This is something we never considered doing with our old deck, so I take it as a positive sign that our home improvement projects are headed in the right direction.
