The To-do List

I stepped outside this morning, full of springtime energy and landscaping verve.  The weather was cool and the wind was very nearly nonexistent.  What to do, what to do?  No, that was not actually the question; Where to start, where to start?  Ah, yes!

I fed the ponies, who friskied and kicked their ways up to the barn.  (That should have been my first clue...)

I checked the 15 tomato plants I planted this week.  (Darwin's Law set into place once again: survival of the fittest.)  They were all leaning heavily to the east.  Must have been something to do with that 2-day westerly we experienced.

I lit the burn pile.  I don't know if I have mentioned this before: a few years ago I took it upon myself to collect a kabillion (and no less) broken-up pieces of concrete foundation, left over from some now-nonexistent outbuildings on our property.  I made a most dandy- and Martha Stewart-looking burn pile ring.  It really looked nice.  We enjoyed a few marshmallow evenings with it, and I burned small household burnables in it.  But then...something...(someone) took over, and the very grand burn ring was laden with GIANT LOGS AND CONSTRUCTION PILINGS, complete with nails and other noncombustible materials.  Things that my gentle little burn ring could not maintain, weight-wise.  This spring, my Martha Stewart burn ring resembles one of those labyrinth prayer mazes, in that it is no longer vertical, but laid out all over the ding-dong place.  So sad.

Digressing, though.  I lit the burn pile: a few unusable boxes, our "shreddable" mail and papers, a dead skunk and a dead duck (apparently the heat from the first burn a week ago was not hot enough, and those two did not incinerate, and let me tell you, there is something downright awful about looking into a burn pile and having a skunk's teeth and a duck's bill looking right back up at you.  Downright awful.)
 
Off to project # whatever:  picking up 79 field stones (I know this because I just went out and counted them.) and laying them up against the chicken house so that I could show that Spouse o' Mine that yes, we do indeed have enough field stone for his addition to the chicken house, his Bike Barn.

After that, I took an aspirin.

I moved on to my next task at hand, hauling out 10 giant (and I do not exaggerate) banana trees, which have been wintering in our old house, to replant them in my little garden grotto by the house.  I dug some holes, took a break, and went inside.  Just to make sure about my banana situation, I called my neighbor friend Mary, whose family is a 4th generation farming/ranching family.  Weather report, s'il vous plaît?

Her husband said it was going to get cold tonight: hold off on the banana farming.

Less than an hour later, the wind came up.  The clouds appeared from every which way, and the temperature dropped significantly.  YIKES!  Now the weather forecast says 31* tonight!!!

Thank goodness for knowledgeable neighbors and frisky ponies.  Small wonder Dole is called Dole and not Webster Armstrong Bananas.