A Week in Review

Even though the calendar reads April, it still feels like it's winter here. I thought for sure things would begin to warm up here, but after our mid-March teaser of nearly 70 degree temps, we headed back into the cold of winter. Winter coats, gloves, and sweaters came back out. Yes, that's right, I had put them away after our warm March days. Perhaps that is where I went wrong, for it seems like it has snowed nearly every other day since then. Even our bulbs started coming in several weeks ago. We'll see if they survive the cold.

The worst, I think, was last Sunday. Scott left to go to church before I did, as he does every Sunday, and by the time I left the house 1 1/2 hours later, we were in a full force blizzard! The snow was coming down so hard that I couldn't even automatically shut the garage door because the sensor kept reading "something" in the way. That "something" was all of the blowing snow! I had to force the garage shut! You know it's snowing too hard when the garage door won't even close!

Then I'm driving to church and there is so much snow on the ground that I can't even see the road. There were some tracks on the road that I was following, but I was on a curvy road and it was hard to follow. Plus, no one else was out driving. At one point I finally realized that I was driving on the wrong side of the road! Another sign that it's snowing too hard- you don't even know where to drive.

Here's one of the trees by church after services were over. It was definitely a winter wonderland on Sunday, but then it all melted by Monday. The moisture is good because we need it, but I'd rather have it come in the form of rain than snow in April!

Here are some of the trees in mountains near us. You can see how snow covered they are.

The middle of the week we were home eating supper when something happened to catch my eye in the backyard. I looked again and it was a pheasant! Now we do have a pheasant that lives near the creek by our home, but since our backyard has been fenced in, we haven't seen him anymore.

My camera was within arm's reach, so I didn't have to make any sudden movements and could use my zoom to shoot out our patio window. Not too shabby of pictures, huh?

The pheasant poked around for awhile looking for food before hoping up on our 7-foot fence. That gave us this nice backside shot of his feathers. He jumped down on the other side of the fence and continued on his merry way.

After examining our front yard, I found these tracks and the answer to how the pheasant made it in our backyard- he simply walked right in off of the street! How funny.

In more serious news, I had "the talk" this week from my assistant director. Basically he wanted to let me know that there was a strong possibly I would be without classes to teach in the fall. I had known this might be coming, so it was no surprise. Currently I am only scheduled for one class, but that may be picked up by another full-timer being required to do an overload without extra pay. So, the waiting continues. Will I be working and if so, how much? Only time will tell.