A calm before the (predicted) storm

The weather forecast is reminding me of what I don't like about winter: rain turning to ice turning to snow--maybe five inches of it on top of ice by Saturday morning, just in time for the student-sponsored energy efficiency expo at which our group is supposed to staff an informational table. Any weather prediction involving ice reads to me like the universe telling everyone to Stay Home. (I'm a serious weather wimp.) Sigh.

But yesterday and today have been a whole 'nother story--temperatures in the low sixties, prompting the playing of hooky from grading, at least for a while. (The student portfolios wait so patiently, after all.) Some of the welcome sights and sounds:

• a horde of robins feasting on tiny red crabapples
• the murmuring of starlings seeking high trees in which to roost
• the front yard semi-tidy after I (finally!) whacked back most of the perennials
• a wren perched on the chimney announcing its presence to the world
• something that may have been a pileated woodpecker excavating a large hole in a sycamore in the city wildlife refuge--the bird just wouldn't cooperate by lifting its head out of its work.

Now if the snowy owl irruption just gets to Johnson T. Janes Park, I might even make peace with winter.