Well, progress on the front yard waterwise renovation has begun here at the Vintage homestead (Latest update on the front yard renovation). However, due to the weather, and the fact the giant glacier in my front yard is taking forever to melt, progress is moving ssllloooowly. Ordinarily, I don’t get too antsy about the lack of progress on a garden project. It gets done when it gets done. The yard isn’t going anywhere.
But this particular project has a deadline that I have to meet in order to qualify for the rebate. The first inspection must be completed NLT than July 1st, and the final inspection must be completed by July 15th. I don’t like gardening under pressure!
The other deadline is self-imposed. I want to smother parts of the lawn using cardboard and cedar mulch. This will kill off the grass yet leave behind lots of organic material for the new plants that will go in where the lawn used to be. My plan is to get the carboard/mulch down before the end of March, before the grass starts greening up and growing vigorously. But I need the snow to melt before I can start the process.
With all that being said, I am happy to report that there has been some progress made. I cut down the dwarf blue spruce that outgrew the area it was planted in. When it comes to plants, dwarf is a relative term. Colorado Blue Spruces can get over 100 feet tall. This blue spruce is a globular shape and was supposed to get to 6 feet around after 10 years. Thus, making it a “dwarf” conifer.
However, after the 10-year mark it just kept on growing and became the “spruce that ate the mailbox”. So, it sadly had to come out.
“Dwarf” blue spruceSad, but it had to be done.
Most of the snow has finally melted in the front yard. So, I was able to start marking out where the new features are going to be.
The orange marks the boundary of where the cobblestone will go. The are where the spruce stump is will become rock. The yellow marks indicate where a crushed granite pathway will lead to the mailbox.
The large area in the middle will be covered with cardboard and cedar mulch.
This is as far as I could go, however. In spite of the recent warm weather we’ve had here, the ground is still frozen solid. So, no digging yet. But I am hoping that in the next week or two I will be able to get the cardboard down and mulch down.
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861
The sun highlights skeletal trees, as a March storm looms ominously in the distance.
March is, in my opinion, the strangest month of the year. It’s the transition period between winter and spring, thus making it the most manic-depressive month by far. This changeover seems to be much wilder and more dramatic than the transition from summer to autumn. The weather is all over the place. Hot one day, snow and below freezing temps the next. And wind. Lots and lots of wind!
I’m not entirely sure why March weather is usually crazier than September. I suspect it’s because it takes a while for the atmosphere to cool down going from summer to autumn. By contrast, the warmup in spring is usually rather rapid, leading to more unsettled weather. But that is just a guess on my part.
And that unsettled weather is why March is such a tease. The sun is higher in the sky, the light is brighter, and the daylength has gotten noticeably longer. So, it you peek out a window, it certainly looks like spring. But oh, can looks be deceiving! For though it may look like spring, it often times doesn’t feel like spring!
Fool’s Spring
The March sun might warm your bones and lighten your spirits. Step into the shade, however, and winter reminds you it is not done with you yet! Or take of your jacket to enjoy the warmth, only to have a March zephyr drop the wind chill by 15 degrees. ARRGH!
March is such a trickster. One day you’re outside on a springlike day, perhaps working in the garden, or going for an afternoon stroll. Signs of life are beginning to appear all around, and the winter lethargy that has gripped us since November begins to fade. Ah, Spring! Welcome back old friend!
Then March laughs and taunts us, by dumping heavy, wet snow the very next day. Take that suckers! Exaggeration? Nope. Check out these photos from March of 2020. I literally unpacked the patio furniture on the 18th and was shoveling a foot of snow two days later.
Wearing flip-flops and shorts on March 18, 2020March 20, 2020
Spring will never get here!
I think I’ve told this story before on this blog. Heaven knows my wife and daughters have heard it often enough. But it goes to my love/hate relationship with March.
When I was a wee lad, perhaps 7 or 8 years of age, my parents informed me that it was the first day of spring. Yippee! I was so excited. All day I kept going outside, looking and waiting for the arrival of spring. I really thought that in one day the trees would leaf out, the flowers would bloom, and the warm weather would return. Instead, while it was sunny out, it was blustry cold day.
And the only sign of green, growing things was some clover in the grass.
Needless to say, I was very disappointed.
And to this day, that is how I feel about March.
Patience grasshopper
The one thing the intervening years have taught me, is to be patient. While I still anxiously await the arrival of “real” spring, I know now that nature moves to her own rhythm. That it is the soil that must warm up before the trees can leaf out and for the flowers to bloom. And the birds and the bees must time their arrival for when the conditions they need have been met.
Still, it is hard to wait.
But I know that in just a few short weeks, spring will finally arrive in all its glory. And March will go from looking like this…
The wreck of last year’s garden in late March
To looking like this by the end of April.
The last days of April
And life will be grand. Well, at least until August arrives, when the days will be hot and miserable. Then I will bitch about the heat, and I will be pining for the cooler days of autumn.
It’s the curse of the Irish: we’re not happy unless we’re miserable.
Posted inGardening, Life, Spring|Taggedspring|Comments Off on The month of March is a shameless flirt
Wings of War by David and Margaret White (Wings of War (bookshop.org), details the development, deployment and combat effectiveness of the North American P-51 Mustang. It is my considered opinion, and the opinion of a great many others, that the P-51 was the greatest fighter to fly in WWII. It is arguable that it is one of the greatest airplanes of all time. It’s certainly one of the most beautiful.
Wings of War is divided into two sections. The first section is about the three men who were instrumental making the Mustang a reality: the creator, the crusader and the warrior, who birthed the fighter that, if nothing else, saved the lives of countless American bomber crews.
The second section covers the Mustang in combat. I’ll get into that part later.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was a breezy read and I learned a lot about the people behind the scenes, and the obstacles they had to overcome to bring the P-51 to the front lines.
The Good
The book starts with the creative genius who conceived and willed the P-51 into existence. Edgar Schmued was born in Germany in 1899. At the age of 8, upon seeing a plane in flight, he determined that his future was in aviation. He was a self-taught engineer, who held several patents in Germany.
After WWI, with Germany’s economy in ruins, he left for more promising pastures. After a stint in Brazil, he eventually made his way to Southern California, where he signed on with North American.
When Britain, fighting for its survival during the Battle of Britain, came calling to the US to purchase fighter planes, Schmued offered them an alternative to the P-40 Warhawk. After a feverish 4 months, Schmued and his design team produced the plans of the nascent masterpiece. The rest, as they say, was history.
Schmued would later help design the F-86 Sabre fighter jet. He ranks right up there with Kelly Johnson, the designer of the P-38 and the SR-71.
Next
The rest of the first act concerns two people: the man who overcame all obstacles to force US Army Air Corp into accepting the version of the P-51 that was married to the British made Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, and the man who led Mustangs into combat over Germany.
Tommy Hitchcock, a scion of a very wealthy family, served in the Army Signal Corp in WWI. Later he became an internationally renowned polo player. When WWII started, he attempted to join the Army Air Corp as a pilot but was rebuffed because of his age. Instead, he became the chief booster of the Merlin equipped Mustang, realizing early on its potential in protecting the bombers flying over German held territories.
Finally, we come to Lt. Colonel Donald Blakeslee, the fighter pilot who fought to have the P-51 taken out of a ground support role and used instead to protect the bombers of the 8th Air Force. Blakeslee was a fighter pilots fighter pilot. He ended the war with over 500 missions and 1000 combat hours.
Now, the not-so-good
As I said, Wings of War is a good book. But it could have been better. I’ll paraphrase the words that so many of my schoolteachers put in my report cards: it fails to achieve its potential.
First, the authors tend to overstate the impact of the raids on Germany’s industrial centers. They rave on and on at how the bombers were laying waste to Germany’s industrial might. Most WWII historians now believe that the strategic bombing of military manufacturing was a failure. The authors even admit later in the book that Germany was able to produce more aircraft in the final year of the war than it made in the first two yearsof the war combined.
They are on stronger ground when it comes to the impact the destruction had on the oil fields in Romania, and on the synthetic oil factories in Germany. By wars end, Germany’s oil reserves were practically non-existent.
The second half of the book covers the P-51 in combat. Amazingly, the “action” portion of the book becomes repetitive and dull. The authors made their point that the P-51 was a good dogfighter in the first 25 anecdotes. This section feels like filler and padding, because it is filler and padding.
Finally, we come to the melodramatic adjectives and exaggerated metaphors, AKA “purple prose”. This overwrought writing is distracting and annoying, and it takes the reader out of the book. Here are some examples of the type:
“There now unfolded across an immense area 833 square miles in size…a spectacular tarantella of combat that filled the skies with fire…“. I had to look that up. According to the google machine, a tarantella is a “lively folk dance of southern Italy”. The authors could have easily used “a deadly dance” and still got their point across.
“There were dodges closer than a matador’s cape in a bullring; there were passes slicker than silk”.
My personal favorite: “Moments flew past, seconds ejected like bullet slugs”. WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!?
In Conclusion
As I said, for all its flaws Wings of Waris a good book. I learned things about this amazing aircraft, and the men who created it, that I didn’t know before. That’s a win right there.
However, I feel it could have been a better book had it gone into more detail on the men, and the obstacles they overcame, to make the P-51 Mustang a reality. I’ll have to reseach and see if anybody has written a biography of Edgar Schmued.
——————————-Intermission————————————
——————–What’s next of the nightstand————————-
The Revolutionary Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff was given to me as a birthday present by a very old (“old” as in I’ve known him for a long time. Well, he too is in his 60s, so I guess technically he is old) and dear friend who felt it was something I would be interested in. And he was right! When I purchased Wings of War, I had been debating whether or not to get The Revolutionary Samuel Adamsinstead. I went with Wings of War and put Samuel Adams on my “to buy later” list.
Synchronicity in action, yes?
Interesting character, Mr. Samuel Adams, a real firebrand. He was the driving force behind the Boston Tea Party. Even his cousin John Adams, who was seen by many as an as a pain in the ass in his own right (watch this scene from the classic 1776: But Mr. Adams Clip), felt Samuel was a tad extreme.
But outside of the Tea Party, Samuel Adams is also something of a historical cipher. After the Revolutionary War begins, Samuel almost completely disappears from our historical consciousness and national mythology. John Adams was part of the Congress that drafted the Declaration of Independence, served as an ambassador to France during the war, and eventually became President. Samuel Adams? Who knows?
Without looking at the interwebz, can you think of anything (besides the Boston Tea Party) that Samuel Adams is famous for? Today, the name Samuel Adams is known to most Americans as a craft brewing company based in Boston.
I can hardly wait to dig into this biography. Thank you, Bernie!
