I can now report that it takes nearly an hour and a half to walk to the hills from my front door. Jeanine and I have been walking a lot lately, partially because it's Spring and partially because walking is good for you. I sometimes forget how much more one sees when walking - all of the minute details of Spring would have been invisible and inaudible to us if we'd driven to the hills today. We especially wouldn't have noticed all of the birds and flowers. There was a vast cloud of seagulls conversing loudly high above us, circling as if looking for the sea. Up in the hills, the crows joined the chorus. Hummingbirds were everywhere, and on the way back we jaw a violently blue little bird sitting alongside the football field at a nearby high school. As near as we could figure, it was a Western Bluebird. Neither of us had seen one before. We ended up walking close to 10 miles, taking a different way back to form a loop. In the hills, we saw a kid looking for snakes, who may or may not have been intending to scare us away from his snake hunting grounds by informing us that he'd seen rattlesnakes. Silly kid. When we looked under logs (or actually what looks like the remains of old telephone poles), All we found was a slightly confused vole. All of the logs looked like they'd been repeatedly turned over and not put back. Narrow strips of dead grass or bare dirt told the tale. I wish people would put things back the way they found them. The kid was still poking around under rocks when we left. Hopefully he put them all back after he was done.

Now, the relatively clear sky has mostly given way to a white, cottony blanket of clouds. The birds are still singing.

Currently listening to: Natural Snow Buildings "The Snowbringer Cult"