What season is this, again? The calendar says it’s spring. This is not spring. 
The downspout burst a month or so ago, and instead of allowing the water to pour into the crawl space, I rigged up a fancy device to pull the downspout away from the house. But a couple of nights ago the downspout burst further up. It might be time to replace the downspout. Also visible, at the end of the downspout, the result of banging at it repeatedly with a hammer to free the ice inside.
The reason for all of this is quite simple. I ventured outside Sunday morning to look at the min-max thermometer, and it registered three below zero. Minus nineteen point four Celsius. This is not spring.
If I had any sense at all I would put the house up for sale and move some place that had a reasonable climate, one where the only experience of snow comes in plastic globes sold for Christmas.
I think about moving from time to time, though the fairly large garden surrounding the house might make it difficult to sell. On the other hand, when we were looking for houses back in the mid 80s we went through a house where the previous owner had a pet monkey that had been trained to use the bathroom (in the house), and the house did eventually sell.
This is the horticultural equivalent of a trained monkey. It’s a good thing I delayed planting of this little garden. It isn’t finished anyway. Imagining the worst, I wrapped the Hesperaloe funifera and Caesalpinia gilliesii. The snow in the right of the picture is really twice as blindingly bright as it appears.
Moving house involves so much work–work I don’t want to do—that I think I’ll just go look at rocks later this week.
the miserable gardener 
Brrrrrrr! I got the shivers just looking at those pics. 🙂
No kidding. It’s a good thing nothing has leafed out. I’d rather have the opposite, of course, plants in leaf, flowers, and spring, but, whatever, huh.
Oh man…that’s just wrong. I’m so sorry.
It is just wrong. I’m not sure it did any damage, though. Time will tell. Almost nothing is actively growing, the winter was so cold for so long, so maybe nothing happened, other than I got annoyed, and the dog loved it.
In a “normal” year there would be bulbs, alpine plants, etc., in bloom, but not this year. (Not last year either.) The snowdrops were blooming last week. (They’re okay with this.) Whoever heard of snowdrops blooming at the end of March? Snowdrops are winter flowers, not spring flowers.
The weather gods hate me. The feeling is reciprocated, so it all works out in the end.
At least you don’t live here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norilsk
The 270 days with snow on the ground sounds a little like here …..Wonder how many outdoor gardeners there are in Norilsk. Growing season fifteen minutes.
Though look at the wiki for Yakutsk. Record low -83.9. USDA Zone -2. If it warmed up 100 degrees it would still be freezing cold.
Great post, and I feel your pain on the delay on everything. And also on how it’s good everything is behind. Was a b*#$& Sat-yesterday, like, “what is going on…then 7 years of it and counting?” It was mid-20’s 2 nights straight, icy winds constantly, and barely hitting 50 after warming from 48F Sat…I know not as bad as Denver, but it’s relative. I think the current pattern and maybe for longer, is definitely on western weirding and winter woeing.
Abq now like Farmington w/ touches of Wyoming, Las Cruces like Abq, so that may not be enough for me now. But Tucson like Las Cruces! Then there’s summer – down here they warmed back to more normal heat than not, but sans the monsoon.
I read somewhere that the places being affected by climate change are further to the north ….maybe it hasn’t come to Denver and these endless cold winters are just a phase. I figure if I moved to some place like Los Angeles there would be record freezes several years in a row. (There was a record freeze in LA in 1949 that destroyed or damaged 70 percent of the plants in the Huntington’s desert garden. And one back in the 1920s, too. With me there, they’d have to switch to alpine plants.)
And then there’s drought.
I’m going to stay here, I guess, and keep ripping out almost everything that needs water, and build winter covers for things, covers that weigh 300 pounds so they won’t fly away in the wind ……