Just a bare two weeks ago this is what the front of our house looked like. And yesterday we had a beautiful spring day. Temperatures in the low 70's and sunny. For two days, actually, we had that glorious weather. The furnace was turned off and all the windows opened. It felt like my winter doldrums were broken. If it only hadn't been for the pesky cold I'd come down with. This is the March Madness that I'm referring to. The madness of having to catch a cold just when I had got to thinking that I might make it through this winter without catching one.

The cold started last Friday and quickly manifested itself into a raging head combobalation. It encompassed my whole head--sinuses were clogged and dripping, head felt headachy and pressured and slightly dizzy and disoriented, and by the second day I couldn't taste or smell anything. ACK! I have spent the last six days lounging about in bed a lot. The worst was not being able to breathe while sleeping. I use a CPAP machine because of my sleep apnea so breathing through my mouth all night long was out of the question. I dug out some Sudafed that had to be a couple of years old. I took them anyway and they seemed to help marginally. By the third day, I dispensed Bill to the local pharmacy to pick up some Puffs Plus tissues (has lotion in its weave) and some Tylenol PM cold syrup. It was amazing how quickly my nose got so sore from all the tissue wiping I had to do for two days so the Puffs Plus was a necessity. I knew the Tylenol would help me at night and it did. That third night with Tylenol PM cold syrup in my body, I was able to breathe enough through my nose to sleep steadily. That was a big help in my recovery. By the fourth day, I was tasting and smelling again. It was a totally weird sensation to eat without being able to taste what you are eating. Was interesting and I was thinking that I'd probably lose weight if I didn't have that sense working every day. But I know I would so hate having that handicap for the rest of my life. There are people out there that do have this sad condition.

But now, it is the sixth day after coming down with this plague and I have to say that I am feeling a LOT better finally. I didn't go swimming today again because I was afraid it would make me too cold and hinder my recovery. Was probably a wise choice. They say it takes two weeks for a cold to go away and I have found that to be true in the past. So, I'm expecting to still feel a bit under the weather for another week but the worst of it seems to be over. I have stuffiness yet but I can breathe and don't have to blow my nose too often. And I have a tiny tickle in my throat that makes me have to cough every so often. Thankfully, it isn't a mindbending, gut wrenching, head blowing cough like some other colds I've come down with. Oh, how I so hate that kind of cough.

Back to the icicles. They are gone now as are the Christmas icicles they were clinging to. Two days after I took that picture, the icicles came crashing down. Lights and all. Easy way to take down the Christmas decorations, eh? That was an interesting couple of days when all the snow and ice was melting off the roofs. Every so often I'd hear this loud rushing sound slide down the roof as some other section of ice let loose. All this was from a storm we had had two weeks earlier. We had rain, then freezing rain, then snow, then freezing rain again, and then five inches of snow. It left the thick snow crunchy on top and hard for me to walk on. We couldn't get the driveway cleared. I didn't go out much those two weeks except to my swimming classes and the grocery store. Was pretty to look at, though.

Ah, this picture is of summers to come. Spring isn't officially here but I'm feeling like winter's back has been broken. So, now to dream of spring and fresh flowers and on to summer and its flowers. I didn't get to put this picture up last year so why not show it now. This was a sunflower that sprouted from the sunflower seeds that had fallen from the bird feeder hanging on the underside of the deck. We had quite a little bed of sunflowers that came up on their own from those bird seeds. This one particular sunflower stretched itself up the highest, produced a beautiful bloom for two weeks, and then the bloom died off. But that wasn't the end of that plant. Soon a few more sunflower buds appeared on its stem and then they bloomed. What you see here is the second set of multiple sunflowers that came along after that first bunch. In all, Bill counted twenty blooms at one time on this one stem. T'was a beautiful sight to see.