ONE YEAR ON: FIRST DAY OF SPRING, 2021

 

Spring in New Hampshire: Snow Still Lingers

 

Greetings, fellow shut ins!  Not being one who keeps track of such things, I was surprised to find that today was the first day of spring.  This brought up recollections of where we were last year at this time--with everything shutting down and people who were fortunate enough to have jobs that allowed them to do so to work from home (in my case, it was at this time that  the university where I work made the announcement that it would shut down the campus--and we were all scrambling to shift the academic program and all other functions online).  In early April last year, given a moment of pause after the initial shock and scramble of the shut down, I posted about the first signs of spring amidst the harder times that were still to come.  One year hence, the first signs of spring have returned, but the trajectory is quite different. The window for registering for my vaccine shot opens on Monday; the campus has opened up (partially) under the usual precautionary protocols, and I am able to work from my office on campus again (I've never been a fan of working from home on a sustained basis), and we're looking forward to being able to do a bit of regional travel again as things start opening up.  As I was wandering about thinking about then vs now, I decided to take a few pix to mark the moment.  I also ruminated on hobby life, then vs now, which I get to at the end of this post: so skip to that to avoid the other bits if that is the main interest. As usual, you can clix pix for BIG PIX in this post...

Close inspection of the rock ledge in the back yard (garden) reveals the first signs of green sprouting up (I look forward to the first bits of color). 

 

Walking all the way back through the woods...

...to the back boundary of the property, the first shoots of green are starting to emerge from the forest floor. 

 

 

Roxy--crossed over the Rainbow Bridge in October 2019

 

I didn't post about it then, but when we entered 2020 we were still very much feeling the loss of our faithful family companion, Roxy, who had passed away in late fall 2019 (she was a Plott Hound mix, also known generically as a coonhound--she was a rescue).  So the sense of emptiness that descended on the outside world with the lockdown was added to by the vacancy that we were still dealing with in our own little world.

 Rose, who arrived in June, accompanying me on this spring 2021 tour of the grounds. 

 

By June of 2020, still during the pandemic, we were finally ready to bring another dog into our lives, and we were able to have Rose--another hound rescue--come up from Virginia. She is definitely a consolation of the pandemic, and was the first sign of things moving in a more positive direction.  Rose is another mix, advertised as a "coon hound" (a Blue Tick), but to our eyes she is much more Foxhound than anything else, and since nobody really knows and we aren't concerned with establishing her bona-fides, this works for us.

 

 Followers of this blog may recall the "coast to coast" crabapple tree--which is far from blossoming at this point...

...but showing first signs of spring, if you look closely enough. 

 

Romanian Army, Russo-Turkish War Era

Bringing things back around to toy soldiers, it was at this time last year that I embarked on my "pandemic project" of the Romanian Russo-Turkish War era army. Which  I managed to actually get done May  (faster than I had thought I would).  

So to mark the anniversary of that project, I've taken the leap and done something I've been pondering--I ordered up the necessary figures and paints to embark on my second and last (hopefully) "pandemic project": the Russian Army of the Russo Turkish War. Since I had already done the Romanian cavalry,  I had a bit of a head start with that project.  With the Russians, I'm starting from zero, so this will be a bigger project. The other major difference between this pandemic project and the last is that this project should carry me through to the "end" of the pandemic (fingers crossed), as opposed to the Romanians, which were to keep me going "into" the pandemic (with no end in sight). Let's see if I can get this project wrapped up sometime in June when we should be taking the turn to regular face-to-face gaming again.  As usual, this project will involve modifying and repurposing figures(would you expect anything less from me?).  So, dear readers, watch for more work in progress posts in the upcoming weeks. 

 

Excelsior!