Foto Friday

If I were just posting the first photo, below, I'd be tempted to subtitle this post as Signs of Spring. To which you might be forgiven for wondering if I had, indeed, lost my precious few remaining marbles seeing that I'm shovelling snow.

To be fair, however, you will note that I'm working outside sans overcoat, and that's one sign of spring. You see, it almost went up to 10°C/50°F yesterday. Another is that I am shovelling snow onto the driveway not off the driveway. It's almost like rewinding a tape: first you throw the snow up there, and next you take it back down. I have never done this before in my life, but I decided to give Mama Natura a little help in reducing the pile. I figure that it will melt faster if I spread some of it back on the driveway. And I do want it to melt down somewhat more quickly than it has been. I know that it seems and looks odd, but it's been an odd winter ... and I'm an odd sort of bloke anyway.

I'm not the only one to do this, however. Nice Neighbour (across the street in the photo — the very same one who helped build that pile with her snowblower) has done much the same thing: much more of the same thing in point of fact. She has uncovered some of her garden down to bare ground, and guess what? She has tulips sprouting up. Can you imagine that they were sprouting beneath all of that snow? Amazing.

There have been other signs, of course. I saw my first robin on Wednesday, and as I continued along that same street I spied Canada Geese frolicking in and over the water. The other day Cuppa and I even saw goslings swimming in the river. The banks of the river are still icebound as are some of the slower river sections, but spring babies have been born nevertheless.

Well, that's a lot of prose for Foto Friday, so here are two photos. Nikki Dee is such an active tyke that when I tried to read to her I expected about a nanosecond attention span, but she actually maintained interest for quite a while, in baby terms anyway. She quite enjoyed turning the pages and pointing to Humpty Dumpty after I had done so a number of times. Maybe, we do have a reader on our hands!




Have a good weekend.