Narrow window of opportunity

May try to do the bog boardwalk this morning.  We have to try to get out before the bugs, a major force in the Great North Woods.  Some years, it seems as if we have about three days between ice-out and black-flies...

This also applies to our "hundred-acre wood", the abandoned ridge farm we own.  I drove in last Friday, finding that the road was still muddy but the bugs were out already.  Well, at least I didn't get stuck...

Spring bogwalk

Enough wind to hold the bugs at bay, so Wife and I hauled ourselves out and hiked.  No sundews sighted, and only last-year's pitcher plants (sorry, sclerotic_rings), but wood anemones and rue anemones and painted trilliums and leather-leaf flowers and an assortment of embryonic sprouts that Wife declined to identify.

Also a raven, to mock us.  But that's expected.

Maybe a bike ride this afternoon, in the teeth of that wind.  Gusts near 30 mph.

Tuesday roadkill report

One dead squirrel by the roadside, pointed out to me by an interested crow.  Yes, I have fallen to the depths where I will count squirrels if nothing else expires on the highway.

Rode out into the teeth of the gale, on the assumption that I am doing this for exercise and the feeling of virtue, rather than to set any world records for the time.  And it is good that I thought so, because the upwind leg took me about 8 minutes longer than the last run over this route...

Shadbush blooming in the woods, sadly without any shad in the river for the blossoms to herald.  This is also known as Juneberry or serviceberry depending on where you live and who you learned your kennings from.

15.28 miles, 1:12:28

Take that, Hugo Chavez

(Or Exxon-Mobil, depending on your political bent...)

Neighbor has just acquired eight pallet loads of (bagged) wood pellets for his next-winter's fuel, a good number of tons which he will have to transfer, bag by bag, into his cellar and thence into the furnace.  One bite of elephant at a time.

Maine-made OPEC.