Weather or Not!

Hi, everyone!

Since we’ve been home from Hawaii, we’ve had big swings in the weather!  Last Tuesday, we broke the record for high temperature on that day in Rochester.  It was almost as warm in Rochester as some of our days on Kauai!  Grandma and I took advantage of the warm weather to start pruning the apple trees.  Most of the branches could be trimmed back with the pole pruner, but I had to help Grandma saw off one big dead branch!

I’m being a good helper on projects inside, too!  Grandpa is repairing a crack in the tile floor in the shower stall.  He needs to color the repair putty to match the tile.  The shade he needs isn’t too different from my fur, so I could help him figure out what colors to mix up!  Grandma said I needed to keep my paws out of the putty while Grandpa was working!

Grandma is hard at work getting ready for the travel dinner!  She’s looking for recipes on the internet.  I’m helping her figure out which ones are best!  We’ve already made the barbecue sauce to go on the pulled pork.  It’s supposed to taste like the sauce from Porky’s Cart, and I think it does!  I was in charge of the special ingredients that went into the sauce.  Now we need to make macadamia nut pesto and then chocolate fudge sauce!  Once Grandma gets the recipes just the way she wants them, I help her write them down on the computer.

After a springlike Tuesday, we had snow on Thursday!  Then on Friday we had rain and all the new snow melted!  I was excited when Grandpa said we could go out to the bay and turn the water back on!  Grandpa drains the plumbing when it gets really cold at the bay.  Pipes filled with water will burst if the power goes out and the water inside them gets cold enough to freeze.  So when Grandpa says we can turn on the water, I know winter is almost over! After we turned on the main water valves, I was a good helper by being a faucet spotter.  First I had to see when the water left in the pipes all winter drained through.  Then I waited for the air to drain out as the pipes and water heater filled up with water again.  Once the water started coming out of the faucet again, my job was done!

This morning, Grandma and I walked around outside at the bay to check for winter damage.  Some animal used the azaleas and euonymus by the kitchen door as a winter salad bar!  The taller branches still have their buds, but the lower branches are stubs!  Grandma says those branches will grow back bushier than ever this season, even though they won’t have blossoms on them until next year.

The ice on the bay is beginning to melt, too.  There’s open water close to our breakwall and puddles of water on top of the ice all over the bay.  Ice fishing season is definitely over!

Love,

Lion-san