The Easter hare has delivered a basket of hard-boiled huevos.
Our weather widget reported 65 degrees by 9:30 this morning with the high expected to approach 80. Yesterday we topped out at 79, and it felt marvelous. It was the first day this year that I was able to start and finish a ride in shorts and short sleeves.
The foliage has exploded. You name it, it’s blooming, or trying to. Wisteria, ornamental plum and pear, maple, holly, lilac, and daffodils.
My snotlocker is paying the freight, but it’s tough to complain when you’re wandering around The Compound during the first week of April in shorts, sandals, and sunscreen.
Mad Blog Media 
Wait till July.
90 here right this minute. Just got back from a hike and picnic down by the San Pedro river. The cottonwoods are leafing out, and we had some nice shade on the trail.
We topped out around 76°. Saw my first quail of the new year, and I think I heard a hummingbird. We hung out a feeder just in case.
Annas hummingbirds are here all year. I take my feeders down in November and put them back usually in February or sooner if I see them humming around the patio.
I loves me some hummingbirds. Quail, too. Cute little buggers scurrying across the street like cartoon characters. “Hurry, hurry, hurry, here comes that dude on the bicycle again!”
The baby quail look like tan golf balls with legs. They move like a school of fish, and they follow mom and dad wherever they go. Fun to watch!
Thanks for the nice blue sky photo. I hope you all had a nice Easter / Sunday. Perhaps with a little bit of nasal relief.
High Country News has an interesting article about Albuquerque:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.4/south-race-racism-albuquerques-racist-history-haunts-housing-market
Yeah, that story pops up now and again. I’m not sure where I first read it, but one of the local TV outfits did a piece last year. It was the subject of a researcher’s master’s thesis at UNM in 2007.
The thing that caught my eye about the KRQE piece was that even the mayor’s property deed from 1928 contained racial restrictions.
Said Hizzoner: “I think it’s really a reflection of how explicitly racist everything was.”
We’d like to think all this bullshit was long, long ago and far, far away. But we’d be mistaken.
“Microaggressions”, meh. If I got spun up about every microaggression, I’d have long ago had ulcers and a nervous breakdown. Seems everything could be a microaggression even when it is not. People ask me where I “got that name”. I just tell them the story, to fill in their otherwise sheltered lives. Its the macroaggressions I worry about. Getting called a “fag” on Long Island back before lycra was popular was always fun. My riding buddy Chuck and I got so many catcalls from the local rednecks that we christened the Middle Island Moraine as the “White Trash Mountains of Long Island”.
I’ve often wondered how many of those old racial restrictions still exist in various deeds and covenants. They are unenforceable but still leave a pretty bitter taste in one’s mouth.
Speaking of the WW II interments, our house is built on what was once the Santa Fe internment camp. This bronze plaque sits on the ridge just above the flats of Casa Solana, which was the camp location. This stuff is just below the surface or in some cases, on the side of a hill near you.
Wisteria looks great in the spring. but it spreads by seed and runners. Back here in Maryland it is the plant of the Beast. A local park just cut hundreds of trees that were entwined with it. Wisteria had climbed old trees and was spreading underground by runners.
Ask me how I know – my former neighbor plantd it near our fence.
Remind me of kudzu in Georgia.
I think it’s one of the many flowering deals I’m allergic to. When it starts coming around I start feeling like hammered shit. But it looks pretty as hell when it blooms.
Of course, we also have the mulberries, elms, junipers, oaks, cottonwoods, lilacs, etc., all battling for a shot at my snotlocker. Lots of contenders for the title.