The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

The day before we left for Los Angeles, we enjoyed lunch with our friend Eric on our backyard deck. Eric declared, "I'm calling it, Spring is here." Right! Heard that before.

While in LA, I received a text from one of my Waitsburg friends with a picture of crocus springing up in her yard. She also wanted me to know that Spring had arrived.

I texted back, "Yeah, I remember last year when we had two feet of snow the last two weeks of February."

I have a picture of a vase of my daffodils sitting on the deck with six inches of freshly fallen snow on the table surrounding them. It's a cute picture and a reminder of the cold to come. And, evidently, rightly so. It's snowing today and we are going into single-digit temperatures later this week. This time I am prepared.

First, I will be turning on every sink, shower and bathtub faucet in the house and guest house. I will crank up the heat in every room and keep all the bathroom and kitchen cabinet doors open. I am determined I will not have frozen pipes again!

No garden clean-up started at this house yet. I know I should probably be thinking about doing something garden prep-wise, because I went to Cascade the other day, and they have tons of garden soil, compost, and fertilizer bags stacked in the front. As long as I see snowflakes, I will continue to procrastinate.

At least I had a healthy dose of sun in Los Angeles and a few stunningly sunny days here in Waitsburg to curb my crankiness. However, with Spring comes taxes and as I start preparing to do our first set of taxes for the restaurant, and my personal taxes, I may go back to cranky mode.

Math has never been my strong suit. Although I am good at arithmetic, preparing taxes, financial statements and anything that is not just a quick calculation is not my forte', nor anything I enjoy. As I've often mentioned, patience is not a virtue of mine, and tax preparation requires a lot of it.

I've recently noticed (maybe because I know tax season is imminent) that anything related to numbers is becoming an irrational annoyance to me. First, the Superbowl. Why does the NFL insist on using Roman numerals to count the games? LVI? Isn't it just easier to say "56"? Are they going to eventually change to meters instead of yards? I never did understand the 1st and 10 down. Is it ten tries? One yard out of a possible ten? Who cares? Move the ball to the goal, then over the line and score!

Olympic coverage had so many numbers running on the screen when athletes were competing, I began to get bored. Ice skating has so many intricacies; artistic, technical, penalties, reductions, and commentary it all starts distracting me from the actual skating. The skier's and skateboarders have distance, height, timing, number of runs, and I'm sure other factors that count. How about a new scoring system; don't fall, don't knock down a gate, just go faster and beat the others down the hill?

Now, I've discovered Curling. Agreed, it doesn't have the speed of skiing, the danger of snowboarding or the artistry of skating, but it drew me in. No plethora of numbers constantly flashing across the screen, the players were so riveted in their plays, there was teamwork and it appeared there was good sportsmanship among the competitors.

With the end of the Olympics and a little time before taxes are due, the only numbers I am intently watching are the weather temperatures. Is it spring yet?