I went back to work on Tuesday and didn’t feel too bad by the end of the day.  Which is actually too bad, because now I have to help Anne clean the house, because Jane arrives … today.  But Dear, I have to write the blog first.  😉

The title of this post revolves around two photos.  The picture above shows a male Downy Woodpecker at the suet feeder, while below we have a Carolina Wren there.  We need to upgrade our suet feeder to the type that has a little roof on them.  The little roof should prevent the starlings from hogging the suet feeder.

The next photo shows a squirrel with an English walnut.  The walnut was leftover from our Christmas nuts.  Since nothing but walnuts were left and since they had been there for a while, I set them out for the squirrels.  The squirrels knew that they liked them, but didn’t really know what to do with them.  They couldn’t crack them, so they ended up burying them instead.

There are signs of Spring all over town, even in our yard.  Our last surviving maple has already bloomed and is now ready to graduate to the helicopter-seed part of its reproductive cycle.  The Goldfinches and House Finches are showing their mating colors, yellow and red respectively, but our yard’s best crop this Spring are political yard signs.  There are several propositions on the April sixth ballot.  Anne and I are dyed in the wool Democrats and apparently members of the tax and spend variety.

Today is Saint Patrick’s Day, but did you know that yesterday was Saint Urho’s Day.  Saint Urho is a fictional hero of Finland.  I say fictional and not even mythological, because he was invented by a Minnesota Finnish-American in 1956.  Gene McCavic later recounted that he invented Saint Urho when he was questioned by a coworker.  He was questioned why the Finns’ lacked a saint like the Irish Saint Patrick, whose feat of casting the snakes out of Ireland is remembered on Saint Patrick’s Day.  In response he created Saint Urho, the saint that cast the grasshoppers out of Finland.