Bye-bye pine trees
Some people feel the first glimpse of a robin twittering away in a tree is the first sign of Spring. Others find solace when the tips of future tulips poke up out of the ground. Around these parts, the first sign of Spring is the complete breakdown (or breakout) of my not-very-stable-anyway complexion. I herald the warm-up in temperature and the increased humidity by promptly spawning a veritable onslaught of zots. My face starts to look like volcano alley. I don't want to walk around the Bucknell campus for fear an over-zealous geologist will want to try and make a study out of me. My point is: I looked in the mirror this morning and was filled with glee that more spring-like weather is on the way. Since it's related, I might as well publicly profess my love for L'Oreal's Feel Natural Correcteur (made all the better by the fancy way of spelling "corrector").
Another sign of Spring is the itch I get to spend lots of money on landscaping. Last year I managed to scratch that itch by filling out the perennial garden, a relatively inexpensive thing to do. This year however, I opened the curtain of the side window in our living room, cursed the three remaining pine trees that are in our side yard, marched into the study where Dave was working, tossed down the phone book and said "Let's get rid of the pine trees." We had a couple of guys come out and give us quotes last week and we officially gave someone a deposit yesterday. He said he'll be by in two weeks to topple the trees, spread topsoil, and then seed the whole area. It's going to be great. Hopefully, we'll get a bit more light in the house, particularly in the morning, plus we won't have a weedy mud pit for a side yard anymore, we'll have beautiful green grass. The other up-side is hopefully people won't throw their trash (not just random McDonald's cups or chip bags; sometimes we get bags filled with trash) in our side yard anymore since there won't be pine trees in which to hide the mess or the culprits. Can you believe people do that? Needless to say, we're both very excited. It's going to make a huge difference to the way our yard looks.