Took it easy today. Cold, just a cold, no autoimmune attack, just a plain, ordinary, mild germ like everybody else gets: normal is good. Napped for three hours and came to thinking wow, I guess I really was tired. Made chicken soup. Tried to talk myself into working on my new knitting project. (Stitches yarn!) Tried on the now-dried blocked one and hoped the recipient will love it as much as I do.

And then finally I went to see what 69F had wrought out there.

The Fuji apple had started to wake up, that was new, just the first few leaves here and there. The sour cherry’s buds grew, too, even if not quite ready to open yet; I doused them in ashes from my friend Krys’s barbecue to kill the Japanese beetles I knew would be right on any new growth. I’d been watching to beat them to it. The squirrels have been digging around that tree and I figure they’re going after where those bugs are hiding during the day.

Don’t do the ash thing to the far more tender leaves of a pear, though; I tried it last year and got what looked like fireblight, the disease, but was actually a more literal version. All the leaves that grew after that were perfectly healthy.

Yesterday, we saw the resident Cooper’s hawk being squawked at, his tail tucked in tight as he dove high into the redwood tree. Four crows tried to harass him there. Two quickly gave that up as a bad idea and flew to the top of the next tall tree over to yell king-of-the-mountain from a much safer distance. (Have you ever noticed how they need to be at the tippy tippy top to declare dominance even when it can’t support their weight and they swing and sway wildly? Trampoline trees.)

Clearly, as soon as I kick this bug I need to go back to Los Gatos Birdwatcher and buy one of those rent-a-cr0ws that they’re hawking. For Coopernicus’s sake.