Happy Groundhog’s Day. The news reports that the various prognosticating groundhogs cannot agree on whether winter has or has not ended. Maybe they can’t agree on whether it’s started. I’m not sure human-groundhog communication is all that sophisticated.
Yesterday was the Imbolc, the Celtic feast of pregnant ewes, a harbinger of spring soon to come. There are no ewes, pregnant or otherwise, in my vicinity (no groundhogs either, for that matter), so I can’t report on their gestational progress.
I did hear a phoebe sing outside my window Tuesday and again this morning. The phoebe’s song is one of my favorite voices of spring, but it shouldn’t arrive here for another six weeks.
The window of days likely below-zero temperatures is six weeks long; two of those weeks still remain, but we’ve only had a few days when the thermometer dipped below zero. Yesterday afternoon was in the high forties. There’s no snow on the ground and my snow shovels rest in a corner of the front porch, unused.
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The Graph
In the last week or so (31 January, that is), all your 2011 sources of income were supposed to have sent you an accounting of how much you earned. Adrienne is better at keeping track of these things than I, but I have learned through the years to put my W-2 in the folder on her desk when it arrives in the mail, so we don’t have to sift through the house looking for it six weeks later.
This is also the time of year when I have to start scraping money together to make my annual contribution to my Individual Retirement Account. It strikes me as perversely appropriate that I make my 2011 contribution in calendar 2012, just as I did the year before and the year before that.
The timing stinks. I just this morning wrote the check to pay off the credit card bill accrued over the year-end holidays. (I’m of the age that I don’t yet pay my bills via electronic funds transfers. I like – well, like isn’t the right word – I need to look at the bill every month, because when I see how much I owe, I always think, “That can’t be right,” then I go through the items and by God, I did spend that much.) (Yes, I know the email that comes with the EFT is itemized, too, but I’m of an age group that doesn’t pay attention to pixels the way we do to ink.) (And yes, a good environmentalist should be more avid to save trees.)
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