Day 53: Spring sprung?

According the UK's Met Office, spring started on March 1st. The clocks will be changing to daylight saving time (equivalent of British Summer Time in UK) here next weekend. To celebrate, I cleared a thick layer of ice from the pathway to our front door today.

As the picture shows, the path is quite long and the ice was more than an inch thick in places. What's more, it was snowing hard as I did it, you can see the dusting on the recently cleared path. The ice was a mixture of refrozen snow melt-water and freezing rain from the storm and I had hoped that a dose of salt and a few warm days might do the job for me, but it was proving very resilient and temperatures are expected to drop to -10 °C during the week. Resilient is a pretty good description of its response to me and my spade too.

Before this we had enjoyed a community lunch at church, in a few extremely efficient minutes the church worship area was transformed by two long tables where we all sat down to eat a pot-luck meal (that's bring-and-share for the UK readers). The girls also enjoyed some fellowship as they had some company in the pre-school zone today.

So has spring sprung? Well even if (like me) you hold on the the old fashioned notion that it will not be spring until the equinox in two weeks time, the probability of the region living up to its very own Dilbert joke seems reasonably high.

Snowman update: he lost his nose during the sunshine this morning and looked a bit forlorn during the snow shower. As did I. Look forlorn that is not lose my nose.