Spring "officially" arrives

For those of you still suffering in the cold and snow up north, here are some beautiful wisteria flowers to tease you about spring (they smell as good as they look).

This last week was pretty quite for us. Kenny went to a birthday party last Sunday for a school friend of his. On Monday, Hope and I (and Beth and Stephen) went to Little Rock to official trade-in the Taurus. On Tuesday, I took the day off and went up to that archeological dig in Little Rock. We were using trowels to clear off a large area that had the top soil scraped off by a grader earlier:

If you look closely in the picture above, you can seen a round, greyish-brown feature in the foreground. This is a cultural feature that the archeologist in charge, Dr. John House, wants to excavate to determine its origin. He suspects it, and a number of other features, are burials--if so, once he gets the permits to excavate, he will remove the remains and burial objects for study, then reburial elsewhere--this site will likely be developed in the near future.

On Saturday, I worked at my office in the morning, and then we all hopped in the truck and drove the backroads of south Arkansas. This trip was part adventure, part firewood venture. We splashed the truck through a few mud puddles and drove past 4 pieces of logging equipment torched recently by vandals:

The skidder in the above picture is probably a quarter-million dollar piece of equipment, and I think the total loss was over 1 million dollars!! Note how the rubber tires had burned away completely, leaving only the steel belts behind. As far as I know, there are no suspects to the arson.

We also picked up a cord or so of red oak firewood from our experimental forest--a large oak had been killed by lightning last year, and is slowly being turned into firewood. I spent part of this afternoon splitting wood, and still have a little left to go. Hope is out planting some tomatoes and spices (e.g., oregano, basil, etc.) and some flowers. I'm going to go change the oil on the truck (although it is starting to look like rain...). Kenny goes on spring break this week, so if we could all recover from our colds, maybe we'll have some interesting adventures to post on next weekend!

Comments

Lisa said…
I wonder if the arson was senseless destruction or part of some kind of protest? hummm.
1:54 PM
jkbinturkey said…
I'm very jealous of your advanced spring. The forecast this week here is a bit discouraging. Nice photo of the wisteria, by the way. Are the redbuds out?

John

PS I updated my blog today.
6:12 PM
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