Edward III

Yesterday our weather was sunny with temperatures reaching the high 60s. We were outside without a coat and the snow melted. Over night the weather changed and we got just about every type of weather imaginable: rain, thunderstorm, freezing rain, sleet, snow, and high winds. I heard thunder in the night but was so tired that I groaned and went back to sleep. Ej said he looked out the window with barely opened eyes and saw spectacular lightning, like a grand finale fireworks display, before he too went back to sleep. According to the forecast, we could get around 6 inches of snow through tonight. That’s Michigan for ya.

With the weather so nice yesterday, we ran all our errands so we could comfortably hunker down and watch the falling snow today.

Our first errand yesterday was to the library. Michigan has a program called “MelCat,” which allows us to borrow books from any library in our state. Once we place an order on their website, they contact a library that has the book and it sends the book to our local library where we can pick it up–and return it when we are finished. It’s very handy. While we were at the library picking up the book I had ordered, we had a very enjoyable time chatting with the two librarians. Our conversations ranged from the weather, our dogs, the wildlife we see, the importance and enjoyment of reading, to childhood memories, to the highest points in the counties in the region. It was fun.

The repair shop informed us that our truck was ready so we picked it up on the way home from getting our taxes done. EJ had originally planned to do our taxes himself, but it’s such a stressful chore that we decided to have them professionally done just to get it over with. It’s a relief to have the truck fixed and the taxes done.

This is a video I took this morning of the wildlife outside the window. Goldfinches and pine siskins are in the bird feeder and deer and crows in the background. I thought it was interesting to see the crows walking fearlessly among the deer. Currently, it is snowing (and blowing) much harder than it was in the video. Everything in the background has now been hidden by falling snow. It looks like the world ends just beyond our hill.

One day last week I was walking Hannah Joy down the driveway to get our mail when I heard yipping from two different directions. It wasn’t the full coyote banshee yowling that I had heard a couple weeks ago, but it was still rather unsettling. I continued walking Hannah for a bit more, but the yips were close enough that I decided to turn around. I really didn’t want to encounter any coyotes on my walk. The next day when I checked the trail cam, I saw that a coyote had crossed our property shortly before we took our walk. From tracks I’ve seen in snow or sand over the years, I’m aware that many animals keep just out of sight of the house. However, it surprised me to see that the coyote was active in the middle of the day. A couple days later, we heard a coyote howl just outside our window. The cry of coyotes is a very eerie sound that makes me think of scary things that go bump in the night. The coyote can be seen running up the hill at the beginning of my trail cam video. (FYI: the temperature in the info strip at the bottom of the cam video is usually wrong. It was actually in the 30s, not the 70s.)

I have decided to call our young rooster “Edward III.” The name sounds very uppity to me and the rooster was acting very uppity for a while, pecking me to try to establish that he outranked me. Also, he is our third rooster; hence the III after his name. To be honest, he has settled down since I set boundaries to let him know of his lower status, but “Edward the Third” seems to fit him nontheless.