A lovely May day.

Wait, it's not May?  Only March?  This weather is beyond delicious!  I left work a little early this afternoon because the bright sunshine and 60+ degree weather was too enticing for me to focus.  My office was a ghost town with everyone having disappeared to watch the SU basketball game anyway, so I quietly faded toward the elevators and drifted to my car.

It was so lovely and warm that I decided to conduct my first proper spring inventory of the yard, to see what is coming up, what needs repair, and start planning which plants need what tending.  Here are some of my finds, both living and just picturesque.

The dogs thought this whole outside on the line with Mom thing was fantastic.  They warmed their bones in the sunshine and on the warm concrete.

I spent some time trying to photograph them, and noted that Phoebe has a lot of different looks.  Most of the time I think she looks like a complete mutt, with a bit of the Shar Pei evident.  Shar Pei wrinkles:

She's fairly delicately built, being about 50 pounds of sinew on a lean frame. Sometimes she reminds me of a bat, and I often think she looks like Zuul.  I tend to think of her as having a narrow head.  But in certain lights she looks very much like a stocky "Pit Bull" (one of the several varieties of them, anyway), which she isn't - not even a little bit.  But I suppose the Rottweiler and Bulldog are what are showing when she looks like this.

For all my efforts at photographing dogs, this was how I inevitably wound up.

But what better way to spend the early evening than with dogs and camera?  I didn't really mind the trip hazards.  Incidentally, the cats were also enjoying the weather.

Believe it or not, that's Tucker's happy expression, crotchety old man that he is.

Finally, I know it's officially spring because the boxelder bugs are out, partying and living it up on our front porch.

Frankly, I like boxelder bugs.  They seem like friendly critters to me and we share our house with them year round, inside and out. Friends tend to think we're nuts that we just let them wander about the house.  We tend to get strange looks and "Um, aren't you going to kill that bug?" But I haven't the heart.  There's no reason they can't share my house.  After all, it's already crowded with two humans and seven pets.  What are a few little bugs going to hurt?