Bad news, good news, bad news... etc...

Well, the last post I was kvetching about how I didn't have any time off.

This post, I'm gonna kvetchy about how I have too much time off...

The blasted truck blew a piston.

This has happened before. The last time I blew a piston, we had to replace the piston in the engine... which is really really not a good idea. The problem was that we couldn't find a replacement engine for the love of money. Replacing the piston is really a band-aid job, and it's so not a good thing to do for several reasons... but we had no choice.

So, when I blew a piston again, I figured it was the band-aid job that went... turned out it was a different piston. Fortunately, this time, we found a replacement engine, and a little heavier duty engine at that...

The good news is that Spring is arriving in Dallas-Ft.Worth. Soon I'll be out in the yard planting and digging and all that jazz... I'd be doing it right now, but the weather isn't allowing it. Rained all day yesterday, and it's started up again today... any digging in our clay soil when it's this wet results in a large mass of compacted, rock hard dirt clods.

So, I took pics in the rain.

Here's the neighbors ornamental pear tree blooming...
Soon, the tree will be covered with dark purple leaves.

Here's some jonquils blooming in my yard...

I've never really figured out what the official difference between a jonquil and a daffodil is... or a narcissus for that matter. But, these were labeled jonquil when I bought them, so I'll take their word for it.

Now, for more bad news... I'm sure my regular readers will remember the record breaking snow we had a few weeks ago. (Officially, it was 12 1/2 inches at DFW airport) Carports collapsed... roofs caved in, Live Oaks, which have branches that grow more or less horizontally and keep their leaves all winter, catch a lot of heavy snow, and were dropping branches all over the place. My carport made it, and I don't have any live oaks, but the Prickly Pear that I grow for jelly-making also has extremely large pads, which caught the snow and snapped branches.

The plant will survive, and I may be able to actually root some of those branches by standing them in the ground. The extensive, established root systems will send up a lot of new growth this year, although blooms, and therefore fruit, come off older growth, so I'm not too sure of the harvest I'm gonna get come presserve making time. But we'll see...

It looks like I've also lost my variagated agave... which was fine till it got buried under the snow and it just gave up. And there's a few more plants which I'm just not sure of. We'll see I suppose...