Sunday, February 13, 2011

Forty-six frumious degrees

"Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe ..."

A brillig day in St Paul.  The warmest day in the last 94, and everything is melting.  It's great.  My ice dam has melted and slid off the roof.  And it's still 43 degrees at 8:30 pm in the largest Minnesota city east of the Mississippi.

My morning walk stretched out to two miles and about an hour on the wet streets of the city.  I even stopped down by the Mississippi at Harriet Island to get a picture of the big river as it flows through the city.  It will be up over its banks in a month or so and we'll be talking floods in the Red River Valley.  The paddle wheel tourist boats are still iced in by the island, waiting for the next season.  Today was calm and bright and just really nice.



It has been a hard winter for the varmints. A bunch of rabbits burrowed under my Asian lilac bush, the one with the beautiful purple spring flowers. The rabbits, and maybe the horde of squirrels that are feeding at the bird feeder next door, have augmented their winter diets with the bark of the lilac bush. Notice in the photo the bare white branches that they've stripped of bark. I'm predicting that it will be a bad year for lilac blooms in my own back yard.


I could use one of those vorpal blades that was used to slay the jabberwocky. I could put a little snicker snack on those lilac eating, evil-doing creatures.

1 comment:

Big Wood said...

Nice pics!
Amazing how much warmer 46 feels in Feb than in Nov.
Set a trap for the bunnies.