Wot happened to May?

The calendar says February is the shortest month, but where did May go?  It's a terribly busy month for gardeners, transitioning from spring to summer, and some things are growing very well because of the cool, wet weather although a half inch of rain would be nice.  Mrs. Phactor is battling with this year's champion, chickweed.  It's everywhere are growing like, well, a weed!  A decent layer of mulch would help, but the gorillas that spread mulch for a living don't seem able to recognize even a tomato plant when they see one, or don't see one, as is more likely the case.  The kitchen garden is transitioning to summer so the lettuces are beginning to bolt, squashes and beans will get going, and maybe finally the snap peas will flower and fruit; you're running out of climbing support.  New strawberries were planted and recently the tree rats helped by unplanting some of them.  Raspberries, particularly our wild black ones, are well fruited. The red raspberry bed is still in recovery, and new black berries look happy and fuitful as well.  
No apples on 2 yr old trees, and only a handful of pears.  TPP is looking for a pollinator pear, and room to plant it. A former colleague used to graft pollinator branches to his fruit trees, but TPP has never had much luck with grafts.  And now it's June.  Some tree removals are pending, and necessary, but an expensive and disruptive process.  Tree guys are in demand, especially really good ones, and generally it means they are terrible in terms of customer communication.  My current good ole boy is better than many, if you can get his attention.  And it's already June.  A project is planned to push back entropy and re-engineer the house's front steps to make them safer and easier for old people to use.  The plan is to return them to a state closer to the originals based on a really old picture, and to add an antique-looking hand rail of new manufacture.  This will also be disruptive and expensive.  Glad the stock market is being kind.

Snow Day - Sort of

Well, the university along with every other entity is the area has whimped out, scared by dire weather predictions, as they are scared by dire economic and social predictions, and declared a snow day. Of course if we really do get snow, then it's tomorrow that should be and will be cancelled. This is a great annoyance because Tuesday afternoon's lab is ready to go, now alternative arrangements will have to be made. So the Phactor just picks up on several ongoing projects and makes some progress on them. Writing a science book is quite a task especially because the field just doesn't stop and wait for you, and even when writing for a non-technical readership, you want things to be reasonably current, and worse, you make one change to accommodate new phylogenetic relationships among prokaryotes and it's like dominoes falling, and you have to change this too and then that and so on. So that's today's task; finding all the dominoes and fixing them up. But it requires changes to at least 2 figures, and that takes real time. At some point in time, it will be cut and run or truly this will be the never ending story. So here's a nice image symbolic of the weather, and something that the robins, who foolishly just arrived a week ago, from the north or from the south (?) will consume as soon as the ice melts.