Twice now in the past week I have found myself out in the backyard, either meandering through the bark-covered edges or climbing around in the flowerbed. The reason for these backyard activities? Weeding. I have been weeding.

Someone please smack me upside the head and make this go away, okay? I am not going to become one of those people who are obsessed with their yard. The sole reason we pay a wonderful gardener to come out and mow and trim and yes, weed, is because both of us truly hate gardening. And yet now that the backyard is starting to look more like a yard and less like a big prickly wasteland, I have found myself out there more often, pulling weeds.

I am trying to rationalize the need to weed the flowerbed with the fact that the little flowers we put in are so small and pathetic that I need to make sure the weeds do not overwhelm them. But what rationalization can I offer for crunching around in the bark while I was on the phone this morning with my parents, bending over far too many times to count to yank up weeds? The only one I can come up with is that they just look so…icky. I want our backyard to be beautiful and pristine, full of flowers and trees and things that were planted there on purpose instead of creeping in and setting up roots without an invitation.

Weeding. Shudder. How the mighty do fall. Or something.

In other news, spring has arrived in the Sacramento valley with a vengeance. Everything's in bloom, temperatures are rising, and by all that is holy, if it is in the low 80's this early in the year, just how hellishly hot is it going to be this summer?

One plus has been that the sun is coming up earlier, which means that when we go biking at 5:30 in the morning we can actually see where we are going. Tuesday morning it was light enough that we could see the rabbits fleeing through the empty field as we passed them – three of them bounding along in random patterns in what was probably some pathetic attempt to confuse us by making us unable to figure out just where they were going. Not, mind you, that we were really all that much of a threat, seeing as how we were on bikes and no where near enough to even consider trying to do anything to them. But we are talking about rabbits, after all – an animal that has never been known for having any sort of brainpower whatsoever.

We didn't go biking on Thursday because I had to get to the office extra early to make far too many phone calls to a whole plethora of architects in New York. But today Richard was off at a library commissioner's conference of some kind or another down in San Jose, so I decided I'd better take advantage of having an entire day with nothing to do, and I went out and did ten miles. I had originally had great plans for doing up to twenty today but there was a rather strong and steady wind roaring in from the north that I decided I just wasn't in the mood to fight with. In my defense, an email from the Davis Bike Club later in the afternoon detailing alternate routes for a ride, due to the wind, suggested I wasn't the only one feeling particularly wimpy.

The rest of the day I have been blissfully lazy. I sat and read several chapters of a book about knitting that was written in the 60's – an era when they still referred to shop girls and when people were apparently willing to wear entire outfits made from yarn and not just sweaters or vests. I also did a lot of sleeping because all this getting up early and going to bed late has finally caught up with me.

And now we are off to a play – Guys and Dolls, I believe – and there will be pie afterwards and tomorrow there will be singing and playing of the recorder that may, quite possibly, involve the opening sequence to Stairway to Heaven, and possibly more biking. But whatever else it holds, tomorrow will definitely not involve weeding. I will be strong. Oh yes. I *will* persevere.