A Greeting

I noticed this blooming daffodil at the edge of the donkey pasture as I was out doing morning chores.  Our unseasonably warm winter has all of us confused.  Earlier in the week I'd found a few dandelions blooming.  Of course the sheep who were following me on my walk quickly gobbled up those surprises.

This has been a pleasant winter from the standpoint that we have not had to chip ice out of the water troughs each morning or drain hoses each night to keep them from freezing up.  We have not had to feed masses of extra hay.  Ordinarily in a cold winter we go through a lot of hay because a ruminant will eat extra hay so that its gut will act like a little furnace, heating the animal as digestion occurs.

The down side is that I have spent so much time outside on these mild days that I've not spent enough time at the spinning wheel.  For the next three weeks I am not in a school as artist-in-residence so I must discipline myself to wash a few fleeces, do some dyeing and get busy producing!

We are expecting the next few nights to be colder with temperatures predicted in the 20's but at this point there is little to complain about. I just don't know how many daffodils will greet me tomorrow morning.