Early spring trimming time

I can't believe how beautiful it is outside, we're getting an early spring for certain here. The morning fog lifted to a scintillating blue and I was out with my little ladder and clippers clipping away. Trimming grapes is very therapeutic, nipping away the deadwood and bringing order to a tangled brown net of vines.

Gave the two shocked-mohawk looking plum trees a nice haircut and then cut back six leggy butterfly bushes as well. I love how springtime is so full of song - the robins and chickadees were singing and peeping in the cypress nearby, everytime I kneel down I can hear the delicate sound of rainwater percolating in the mulch.

Found holes where a new family of ground-squirrels have moved in beneath a fir...did a little raking and planted a row of gladiolus bulbs along a fence to go with the crocosmia in the summer, purple to mix with the orange, should be pretty.

The crocuses and candytuft are blooming already, forsythia is budding and daffys are coming up thick and fast - and it's barely February! The ground is soft with the rains and everything is washed fresh and ready. It's so lovely, I just wish I could somehow share it with you.

Book meme - sentence jumbling

Yoinked from lothithil just because my curiosity got the better of me.

1. Take five books off your bookshelf
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph

I really thought about 'cherry picking' some books for this based on what I know of their literary styles, but thought "Naaah - really pick up those five books!" The five books in question were the actual stack I currently have by my bed which happen at the moment to all be nonfiction and I just wondered what they would look like in a blender. It really isn't always like this...

Book #1 Parkinson's Law, Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson
Book #2 The Essential Erasmus, Desidarius Erasmus, Dolan trans.
Book #3 Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, Thomas Cathcart
Book #4 On Government, Cicero, Grant trans.
Book #5 On Old Age, Friendship and Divination, Cicero, Falconer trans.

*place in a box and shake vigorously*

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. I feel that entirely too many people confuse what are really natural gifts or endowments with virtues! If we choose to behave as if there is a God and we get to the end and it turns out there isn't, it's not a big deal (well, maybe we've lost the ability to thoroughly enjoy the Seven Deadly Sins, but that's small potatoes compared to the alternative), if we bet there isn't a God, and get to the end only to find out there is a God, we've lost the Big Enchilada. For neither the Spartans, who invented your life-style and way of talking and who recline daily at their meals upon couches of wood, nor even the Cretans, who never even reclined at meal-times at all, maintained their states more successfully than the Romans - who find time to enjoy themselves as well as to work. "Nothing could please me better," Quintus said, and when this was said, we arose.

Whew!