SPRING has SPRUNG

There is nothing as awesome as a nice, tell, 20 ounce Latte and reading the newspaper during a moderately warm Spring afternoon.

As I write this, I am winding down from my workday at the office where I am an assistant in the legal profession. We're starting to get a bit more work now that the Coronavirus Pandemic seems to be over, or at least next to over.

The weather lately has been mild, amazingly enough. Last Spring -- March-May 2021 -- was cold. This Spring has been colder and rainier than "normal", but during the past two weeks I haven't had to switch up the heat at home, and the past few nights I've been able to crack open my bedroom window and sleep with some fresh air -- without freezing.

This particular morning when I took my camera with me during a bike ride, it was a rare sunny day. We've had basically over seven months of clouds, 40F weather, and rain.

Still, there are days when it's 40-45F (4-5C) and it's wet out. Cold, cold rain. And the fact that it's still this way in May is disheartening, at least weather-wise.

There was even some frost one morning the last week of April, but mostly the daytime temperatures have been around 50-55F (10-12C) and nighttime temperatures have been above 40-45F (around 5C or so) so I am not complaining.

My St. Patrick's Day treat -- a soft taco and some 'tater-tots', with salsa.

In my radio hobby, I haven't been DXing all that much, because MW has been so-so for that, but usually I switch on my Grundig G2 when going to sleep or waking up and listening to whatever is on the SW bands -- usually the 31 and 25 Meter bands, and sometimes the 21 Meter band also. Some mornings and nights are decent, others are horrible with just static. I think the sunspots are very slowly improving, and we still have a year or two until the SW bands open up -- I just hope there are still some SW stations to hear when they do.

My Lotus L520, a Les Paul copy with a short tail (the tailpiece is closer to the bridge than nearly all other Les Paul style guitars), which I've been re-adjusting for slide playing, by gradually dropping the height of the tailpiece and increasing the height of the bridge by thousandth-of-an-inch increments to get it just right for Slide guitar playing -- without popping strings.

As for the rest of life, I still do some fiction writing and slide guitar playing -- I am still nailing down my abilities with a slide on my finger, which is quite a process, as you're creating your own notes, and it's easy to screw up. I'm miles better than I was two or three years ago, thanks to practice time during the Pandemic. I also finally got my two 'backup' guitars (an Ibanez Gio and a Lotus L520) to 100% for slide -- increasing the string tension gradually to where the guitar works with a slide a lot better. It's taken some time because I have been incrementing the string tension by raising the bridge or saddles by thousandths of an inch at a time to keep from popping strings.

My main bicycle, a Ventura -- a steady and easy rider. 

A nearby Frog Pond. At night, if you stand near the center of it, you can hear the frogs croaking and chirping in stereo.

The Cedar River from one of my favorite spots to photograph it. I usually take a pic here every season... Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... On this day it was just a few days after the trees budded, two weeks later than normal. The trees weren't fully leafed out for another week or two after this pic was taken.

Although there isn't a ton to talk about this blog post I am throwing in some pictures of Spring in the Renton and Seattle area to liven the blog up a bit, and show people in other parts of the world what it's been looking like around here -- just more than half of my readers are on other continents, so I figure it might be fun for them to see what it looks like in my region this time of year.

Spring, of course, over the past three years or so has been cold, and mostly wet. In other words, if the trees didn't leaf out and the daffodils didn't come up at all, you wouldn't know it was Spring. But it is what it is.

C.C., May 10, 2022.

Edited May 19 -- some formatting was messed up. Woops.