Tiny Flowers Coming

I went out to the flower bed in front of the house during the few minutes this afternoon when it wasn't drizzling to check out what's sprouting and what might be ready to bloom. I was most excited to see the tiny squills just about ready to open. They're tiny, only about 1 1/2 inches tall and the flowers will be about the size of a pinky nail. But they're so cute. Little white bells with pale blue stripes. Can't wait.

 

And the daffodil buds are taller and just about ready to open. When I was a kid in Evansville, IN, the daffodils bloomed for Easter. Not so in Wisconsin. The grocery store daffodils are blooming but the garden ones aren't ready quite yet. That's okay. I can be patient.

 

While I was out there I took a picture of the remnants of last month's Blizzard Elsa. There's not enough snow left to make a respectable snowman, although I can see a mound of snow down at the other end of the block and, of course, the parking lot mountain behind the neighbor's house isn't all melted yet. 

 

I splurged on some reduced fat Cheezits (they were on sale) and spent some time portioning them out into little snack bags. Fourteen crackers per bag counts 2 WW points. I confess I ate the broken ones.

 

Most of the day I spent critiquing, first cda's submission for Monday, and then two of the ones for Wednesday. I've figured out how to make comments on them without writing in the lines of the work. If you highlight what you want to comment on, a little box pops up on the right margin, and if you click on it, you can write what you want to say and the little box stays there so the author can read what you said. Very tidy.

 

In bird news, a Robin scampered over to the ground under the square green feeder and evidently found something to eat. Fallen seed would be my guess. Anyway, it stayed there for enough time to have a picture taken. Two or three pictures even.

 

The Spectrum maintenance tech showed up today and spent some time up in his bucket (in the drizzle) checking the wires outside. They're all just fine, he said. Which means my laptop is probably the culprit of my Zoom problems. He gave me one tip to try to fix it by lowering the bitrate (I have no idea what that means or does), so I googled it and followed the steps and lowered something. I hope it's the right something. Monday morning's Zoom with cda will be the test. But I will be visiting a computer store to see about a system that will be able to handle hours of Zooming at a time. The tech also suggested getting a new modem from Spectrum. Maybe it's the modem. They gave me a new router last week but I've got the same modem. I'll call them and get them to send me a new one. Couldn't hurt. I love technology.

 I spent so much time critiquing today that I didn't make time to draw so no pictures of creatures or food.

Happy Easter! Tomorrow's Easter and I get to go to Shawano to spend the afternoon with DIL1's parents and DS and family. I just hope it's warm enough that the roads aren't icy. HJZ said they had ice again today. Ugh. But it's supposed to be close to 50 tomorrow so it should be alright.

--Barbara