First Wildflower of the Season...

...and I haven't been able to identify it. Maybe when the foliage is a little more obvious, I'll be able to find it in my book.

Where, exactly did April go?

This month has flown by. I guess I've been preoccupied with learning the ropes in my new job, but holy smoke I don't know where the time has gone.

The leaves are out on the aspens in Williams Lake, so it won't be long now till our world turns green too. Last year the aspen leaves opened May 6; I wonder if global warming will speed things up this year by a day or two? All my bulbs are poking up now, and will flower in due course.

We've finished clearing the bulk of the dead pines...there are numerous huge burn piles to light up when the weather turns wet, or when the snow comes. I foolishly lit one the other day, and immediately strong winds arrived, and I spent the next five or six hours putting out spot fires. I even managed to burn a bale of hay a hundred yards or more away. No more big fires just yet. I have humbly learned my lesson.

Clearing

A sad fact of living in BC's interior is that all the mature pines are dying. Standing dead pines present a massive risk for wildfire, and so we've determined that all our pines must go. Cliff is here today with his excavator, taking down a large stand of them. Our forest is turning into pasture. The back of our property has spruce and fir, and virtually no pine, so we won't lose everything. We lit one fire, but the wind has come up, and we're afraid of igniting the dead trees across the road, so we're letting it die down and are going to wait for a damp day to do more burning.

It's Coming...

For all my grouching about lack of spring, it's definitely in the air this morning. It's a heartstoppingly beautiful Cariboo morning...a light frost, and a blue, blue sky. It's the kind of morning that makes you stop on the porch and just inhale deeply.

Here are the boys, at breakfast time this morning.

An Update

Here's a quick recap of the past week:

I made a lightning trip to Vancouver to get Jen to the airport (she is now safely in South Korea) and then had to race up to Kamloops to endure three days of work related education. Spring has sprung in Kamloops - it has yet to arrive at our place. Most mornings when I phoned home, Mike reported new snowfall.

Mike did lots of greenhouse prefabrication while I was away, and today we got it upright. We'll cover it next weekend, and will be able to start growing things soon after! Speaking of growing, my garlic is sprouting! And so are a couple of daffodils!

Greg came to do Buck and Rupert's hooves on Friday. Rupert was first...when Mike went to get him, Buck was sound asleep. When he woke up and found Rupert missing, Buck began racing around frantically until he saw Rupert standing in the driveway. They're quite attached, those two, even though they pretend not to be.

My beautiful sleek golden horse is emerging from his teddy-bear winter coat! Rupert is still in full winter coat, but Buck is looking gorgeous again.

I'm just home from work...my last evening shift! I start a 7 a.m. till noon Monday to Friday job this week. There a weak display of aurora borealis going on in the northern sky tonight.

Will put up some photos in a day or two.

Monday...

The blossom total has tripled!

We've been having varied weather over the last few days, sun, rain, snow, sleet, hail etc. We did some minor burning on the weekend. While I'm away this week, Mike is taking a week off work to mind the farm and build my greenhouse!

Look for a new post here on the weekend.

First Annual Inman Road Blossom Count

One. One snowdrop. That's all so far.

Rupert with the sky on fire...

For my annual (slightly belated) birthday excursion we headed off along the backroads complete with my nifty new GPS; destination Horsefly. Around noon we were at Hendrix Lake, and decided to check out the community. It seems to be a modern-day ghost town...the general store's roof had caved in long ago, and the lakefront row of cookie-cutter cottages circa 1940's were long abandoned. A couple of them look as though they may be used for summer homes. We saw no evidence that anyone had been there all winter, except that the roads were all well plowed. There is tons of snow up that way still. There's an abandoned mine nearby apparently, so we're thinking the community more or less died with the mine's closure. Something to research for sure.

Past Hendrix Lake, the road got worse (as in unplowed and melty) and we would have turned around and gone back had there been anywhere we could have done so. (There was still about three feet of snow on the ground in some areas!)The road was in terrible shape for about 10 kilometers, but conditions got better eventually, and we reached snow-free Horsefly without further incident. It is a depressed looking little community, and though it's probably quite pretty in the summer, it was looking a little bleak.

We saw a just-born black angus calf with its mother still licking it dry. We saw the Horsefly fire department tending a badly escaped grass fire. We saw tons of water birds, millions of robins and juncos, several hawks, and a grouse standing in the middle of the road that we had to stop for.

Elbow Lake, between Hendrix Lake and Horsefly




A lovely old barn near Horsefly. The bay mare by the barn was heavily in foal.
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Yesterday we spent the day working at home. Mike took down about 10 dead pines. We had a good fire going, and by early afternoon had burned everything we're not keeping for firewood. The warm weather for the last couple of days has melted most of our remaining snow. There's lots of standing water, but luckily it's all well away from the areas we use.

Springtime Cuteness

We went to see my friend's lambs today, north of Lac la Hache. They are hair sheep, and don't need shearing! The lambs are adorable. The white sheep in the last pic with the brown lamb was quite old, and they didn't think she was pregnant. She surprised them with a single tiny lamb.