Springtime continues

To me, April is the quintessential spring month, yet in some of the places I've lived (Ann Arbor comes to mind, not to mention Boulder), it's still very wintery. Here in Ridgecrest we're right on the cusp of summer in early April. Today it's supposed to get to 81 degrees, which is summer in my book (though not in Ridgecrest's book). We're thinking about a Death Valley trip this weekend and it's already in the upper 80s there.

It's actually very pretty here right now. The big fields near us are full of wildflowers. (Can something be a "field" if it has no grass? My dictionary defines a field as "a broad, level, open expanse of land" so I guess so, but I think the quintessential field would have grass.)

Last Sunday of course was Easter, and some of our neighbors put up Easter decorations.



The big cross in the middle went up at Christmas and they left it up until Easter, when they added the other three symbols. I drove by the house today and noticed they'd taken everything down, unlike this house:



which keeps its cross up all year. No, this is not a church. The sign in the window is the Ten Commandments, in case anyone passing by needed a refresher course.

Ah, spring. Ah, Ridgecrest.

Just like last year, the weeds in our backyard are getting completely out of hand, but we are hoping to deal with them ourselves rather than hire someone to weed-whack the whole yard at great expense. This is probably unrealistic, seeing as how Rocket Boy has that broken elbow. I keep waiting for our foster tortoises to arrive, so they can eat the weeds, but I need to remember that a tortoise is not a goat.

Yesterday our neighbor to the rear of us was digging up his backyard using a backhoe (the babies found it fascinating of course) and he offered to pull up some of our dead trees. We have more dead trees in our yard than live ones -- there's something you probably wouldn't experience anywhere except the desert. I said sure, go ahead, so he managed to pull up two dead conifers (he just reached over the fence with the backhoe and grabbed them).

Some of our landlord's fruit trees died last summer too. We need to go through the little orchard and pull up the dead ones. We also managed to kill 2 or 3 rosebushes, so those need to come out. Our agreement with our landlord says that we will maintain the plantings, but since he won't fix the sprinkler system (or for that matter return any of our phone calls), we're not too concerned.

Sign at the Indian Wells Valley Water District office: Brown is Green. We're doing our part.

I saw quail in the arroyo almost every morning this week. No lizards yet. Spring is here.