Well, Hail!

It was a gorgeous warm and sunny day today. Got up over 70 and was a little humid. I opened the windows to let real springtime air in. Now we're paying for it. It's pouring rain and a half-hour ago it was storming like crazy with thunder, lightning, wind, rain, and hail. Not tiny hail either, good size hail that made loud noise when it hit the aluminum trash cans on the patio. I waited until the worst of it passed to open the patio door to take a picture.

 

The squirrels were active today. They found that I'd refilled the cob corn feeders so they were dangling there having a nibble. They must have dropped some because one spent quite a bit of time on the ground under the feeders cleaning up the dropped kernels.

 

This morning I went out to see that the oldest daffodils had opened overnight. I had forgotten that they're the double kind of daffodils with a ruffly center instead of the traditional trumpet, but I have some of those too. They'll open later. I hate to think what the pounding rain and hail will do to them but I guess that's spring for you.

 

A few of the squills managed to survive the rabbit assault. They're so tiny, just barely the size of a pinkie nail, they must be easy to miss.

 

And the hyacinths are in various stages of opening all over in the front flower bed. There're white ones and purple ones. I don't think I have any pink ones but they all smell great. I tried to get a closeup of the biggest purple one but it's too close to the ground for me to crouch down enough. I kept getting blurry shots of the bricks or one floret so I gave up.

 

Today's creature drawing is Salmon. I will confess that my salmon is portly compared to the sleek fish in the example. I tried to draw it right, I really did, but now when I want to draw something long and thin, I get something short and round. Oh well. At least it looks like a fish.

 

I spent some time editing my already edited chapters trying to beef up the sensory details. It's not an easy task since I'm at the stage where I'm happy with what I've written so it's difficult to add things. I'll keep trying. I rely on the other members of the Novel Intensive critique group for help in that regard.

I got my taxes back today. I'm getting money back so that's good, although I wish I could figure out a way not to have the government play with my money for a year. I just don't trust them these days.

And guess what. I got kicked off Zoom this morning. Again. When I called Spectrum they said that there was an outage in the area, so it wasn't just me, but that is so frustrating. The Customer Service guy called me when I was driving across town after picking up the taxes and he said they're working on my problem. When I drove down Fisk St. near my house, there was a Spectrum bucket truck working on a pole just a block from me, so maybe my neighborhood's the problem.

Tonight was the Scout cake bake. Here's what OJ and DS made--a galaxy mirror glaze cake complete with stars. Isn't it amazing? 

--Barbara