PODS!

I love nature. I love trees. But even I am having a hard time loving our locust trees right now. Funny thing is, we had locust trees (the 100-year old variety) at our old house. The only thing better about these much younger locust trees is that they don't drop deadly 6-inch thorns that pierce your shoes.

But they're trouble enough. In dry years, the girl trees (we have two in our yard) produce an extreme number of pods. Apparently the girls go into stress and feel the need to reproduce, so as to create even MORE locust trees.

The pods are heavy to rake. But they're somehow light enough to blow everywhere. On windy days, you hear them hitting the house with a "clunk". And worse, they blow into our neighbors' yards.

Our yard looks like this. If you're unlucky enough to live next door to us, your yard looks like this, too. So my first task in Pod Clean-Up is to rake everyone else's yard, such is the extent of my POD GUILT.

Spouse prefers to wait until every last pod is down from the trees before dealing with them. Maybe he's hoping that they'll blow right on out of our yard.

It's probably not a good sign when it's easier to shovel than rake your yard.

Can I get some sympathy? Or at least some ideas for a pod craft project?

A Different Kind of White Stuff

The spring storms have started! I barely made it home yesterday before we were pelted with a nice little hail storm:

Fortunately, the hail was merely pea-sized, not big enough to do any serious damage.

But it was a peculiar reminder of the OTHER kind of white stuff which has covered the ground for the past few months!

And it only took four months!

Some of you may recall that we had our house painted back in late August. At the time, we took down the PINK metal house number plaque because it (thankfully) did not match the new color scheme. Since then, we've had no house numbers, which is not a good situation for all sorts of reasons. A month ago, I finally fashioned a paper house sign which at least made the UPS guy happy.

We spray-painted the pink metal plaque black, but we were apprehensive about painting the embossed numbers and the scroll work.

I picked up a small bottle of "yard and garden" paint at Hobby Lobby, suitable for metal and outdoors. First, we (read: Daughter) tried to use a brayer for the embossed areas, but we quickly discovered that it tended to pull the paint up with each roll. A fine-tipped paint brush worked best for this detailed job.

And here is the finished plaque. Now everyone can find us, only four months later!

Ice Storm

I love a good ice storm.

I know that ice is not good for power lines or trees, but I think it can be beautiful. It turns ordinary branches into glistening jewels!

This small tree at the corner of our house took on more than its share of ice in yesterday's storm.

On some branches, the ice was nearly an inch thick!

My thought is this: We can't control winter, so we might as well try to see the beauty in it. And this winter, we've certainly had ample opportunity to do just that!