Signs of Spring

It's a good time to look for signs of spring. There are a lot of them around, including yesterday's sighting of rollerbladers and shirtless runners. On one of my sauntering walks around this St Paul neighborhood, I encountered a few more and used my search engine to try to identify the flowers by their common names. In a lawn on Lincoln and in the edges of the park's grass at Linwood Park there are lots of these blue star scillas. They are always one of the first flowers that emerge from their long winter nap and a welcome sight.

The seemingly out of place white magnolia tree is nice. An early and prolific bloomer. This tree is a couple of blocks away, on Lincoln, I think. It was in the same lawn as the blue stars.

And your classic yellow Dandy Lion. These hardy beasts were growing out of a crack in a wall next to the sidewalk on St Clair. They can germinate when the soil temperature is as low as 50 degrees. Today it made it to 64º, just three degrees below the average high for the date here. It might be spring.

There is a fairly new French themed bakery on Grand Avenue, Chez Arnaud. They sell pastries as well as French style quiches.  After a stop at the First Grand ATM, NCW and I stopped to see what kind of pastries were available today. They had pain au chocolate, but nothing, they said, with almond paste. We bought a pastry, pain au something else, with raisins and custard or cream filling of a Frenchy variety. To share later over a coffee. We asked, they said zero calories. We cut it in half and we did the math. Zero divided by two gave us each zero very tasty calories.