Do I Even Have to Say It? Ridiculous!!

I shouldn't have to. Look outside. April 16th. Ridiculous.

I woke up to birds singing. I thought maybe the snow hadn't come. But it had. I thought maybe it wouldn't be enough for the schools to cancel. But it was. The kids get ANOTHER day off, so do I apparently.

I went out to feed the birds and get the paper. I wore my very attractive pink turtle robe and my fuzzy black boots. Red doggie pants. Snow day attire? I noticed, here's my attempt at being positive...that the snow is good packing snow. It has potential for snowball fights and snowmen.

The only thing I can do is go with it. And start the day with chocolate chip pancakes.

April Snowshowers Bring May Flowers?

How does that work? Snow in April. Well today it is more like sleet, rain, snow till it hits the ground...whatever. I don't like it. I'm sick of it. I am ready for warmer days so I can go out and enjoy nature. I remember growing up near Rochester and loving the snow. I used to listen to my parents complain about the weather up here and dreaming of moving South. I used to think they were, um, old. Now I am apparently, um, old. I find myself more and more thinking about the time when my husband (I will have a husband in 57 days!) and I will move South and spend more days running and golfing and hiking. That won't happen until all five of our kids are done with high school. I am hoping to encourage all of them to pick colleges in the South so at least they will be closer. One is thinking about Johns Hopkins and another Duke- which is good. So they are only 11 and 8 and they are really focusing on lacrosse at this moment, but still... Days like this keep my dreams alive.

Google Lost a Snake? Big Deal.

I read an article the other day that was supposedly "big news" about someone at the Google head offices (the Googleplex?) losing their pet ball python and the ensuing behaviors of the Google workers. Apparently people were avoiding dark spaces and the restrooms for fear of "running into" the snake. That made me laugh. First of all, ball pythons are pretty innocuous as far as snakes go; not venomous, not aggressive and definitely not fast (unless they are eating). We have several ball pythons that are our snakes of choice to use for children's programming because they are so easy to handle. And yes, we have "lost" them a time or two. But unlike at Google, animals disappearing out of their cages is kind of a common occurence here. It isn't unusual for someone to come into my office and say...um...so and so isn't in their cage. Then we have to go on a search. Sometimes it's a snake, sometimes it's Buddy, the groundhog, sometimes it's Bernice, our African-spurred Tortoise. I think even once our former Naturalist left a container of leeches open on her desk and they, of course, got out, and were crawling down the desk and all over the office floor... Tanglewood is a fun place to work partly because of stuff like that. And we certianly can't avoid going to the bathroom when something is "loose" because we'd be bursting at least a few days a month. We never find the snakes in the bathrooms anyways.