They 1/2 E 10 Z rhododendron

And the fringe tree and the holly and the star magnolia and the arbor vitae and the tree peony and some daffodils and substantial amounts of pitch pine and metasequoia. We shall not be greatly troubled by azalea blossom this year. I have to see if they ate the rosebush I have never liked.
"They" being the deer. It was the second snowiest winter in something like 175 years of record-keeping; it was like no other year of the 15 my plough guy has been ploughing this driveway, in that he ran entirely our of places to put the snow. The first three years I was here I saw perhaps one deer a year, mostly eating fallen apples. It's been multiple deer daily for a couple of months, eating atoms and brambles.

I think many of the chomped shrubs will live, though their actually recovering enough to flower may not happen for a few years. I am taking it remarkably calmly, perhaps because not attracting deer has been such a good excuse for not doing more to terraform the garden area.

The recession of the glaciers here (don't mistake these things -- they may not be a mile thick yet but they are Just Waiting, the great icy baftards) has also revealed a touching sprinkle of failed presidential candidate spoor, Romney and Richardson signs coming up like rather bent snowdrops.

One of the weirdest things has been the persistence of light after dinner, usually a sign that it is time to put off raking and weeding, concurrently with huge piles of dirty ice. Land Comets. They are diminishing gradually.

It was supposed to rain all day Saturday, and Doug had scheduled a fiber day in a warm living room -- he even used the last of the wood to start the first in the the woodstove in a couple of weeks. At first this looked like an excellent call, but by noon it was in the 60's outside and we moved onto the porch, where we got sunburned. I was okay with that. Then I drove to Northampton, MA, basically to hang out with the nearly graduated daughter. They even have swelling lilac buds and fully open daffodils. Now it's sunny and clear and Monday again, for heaven's sake.