Early March is the time to think about early spring planting
The Cabbage White Butterfly Moon is new today. When lawn growth begins, then soil temperatures are rising through the 40s.
The March 9 cold front is often the most dangerous and the coldest high-pressure system in the first two-thirds of March. Tornadoes and flooding are common.
Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. on the 10th. Set clocks ahead one hour. Transition your pets and family gradually to their new daily schedule.
Spray fruit trees for mites, scale and aphids when temperature remain above 40 for several day. Jupiter and Venus are the Morning Stars, Venus always the brighter. Mars is the Evening Star. Saturn moves along the southern horizon following well behind Jupiter until dawn. By the first week of March, Orion has moved off to the west by midnight, and Corvus, May's corn and soybean planting constellation, appears on the horizon.
March is National Craft Month. Start the project you have been longing to do, or finish the one you think will be the death of you.
Still need our fireplaces turned on now and then, and dark gloomy days call for candles to warm our hearts and make us smile.
Burned down candles can make lighting a tad difficult, hard on the fingers. If you are out of long fireplace matches, try a strand of uncooked spaghetti.
It is long enough to reach wicks and will burn long enough to light a candle. Either move the candle to the stove - helps if you have a gas one - or take the match to where you want to light something. I tried it, it works.
Another month of exercise and walking. Has it become a habit? I suppose so since I do the exercise every morning and walk enough during the day to get the allotted steps in. Am I happy with it, no. I know that we are told that 20 days of doing the something will make it a habit. Unlike smoking, the exercise habit can be happily broken in one day. Maybe your healthy habits are more deeply ingrained than mine, but I know that one missed day is the beginning of the end, the second is the end. So still have not missed a day, am afraid that even a Sunday off will be the break me.
It's not too early to think about filling out the NCAA tourney brackets. The first games are March 19-20. Before the schedule comes out, some things to process.
One in 9.2 quintillion are the odds of filling out a perfect bracket. $1.9 billion is the estimated loss in dollar value in employee productivity during the Tournament.
Thirty-five different schools have won the tourney. 2008 is the only time all four No. 1 seeds made the Final Four. At least one No. 1 seed has made the Final Four every year except 1980, 2006 and 2011. No. 15 seeds have eight wins over No. 2 seeds. No. 14 seeds have 21 wins over No. 3 seeds. UCLA has more championships, 11, than any other school.
Doesn't that info make filling our your brackets easier? The easiest way to have a perfect sheet? Fill it out after each game.
The Born Loser: "Anything of interest in the news today?" "There's a new study of potential alternatives to traditional cough medicine." "Did they find anything that worked well?" "They did, and here's the best part - it's chocolate! They found it may actually work better than cough medicine as a suppressant. Where are your going?" "I feel a cough coming on!" Oh wouldn't that be wonderful?!
Not long ago, it took three tries to get my column turned in. The actual column went through without problems, it was trying to tell the editor what day if was for.
First I had the date wrong, corrected that twice, then discovered not only did I not know the date, had the wrong month.
I found this question/answer from Marilyn vos Savant interesting. Question: I sometimes go through the day thinking it's a different day, and it gives me the creeps when I find out. Please tell me this is a common phenomenon.
Answer: the experience is widespread and occurs most often on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, probably because those days don't have the strong individual association and aren't distinguished from each other as much as Fridays (end of the workweek), Saturdays (date night), Sundays (home and family) and Mondays (beginning of the workweek). Now I need her to tell me why in the middle of February I was still in January. Is it because February is too icky to think about?
"Some bleak February mornings it's all a guy can do to rise, eat an 18-ounce bag of white corn Tostitos, and go back to bed. Then one morning, you wake to sun that makes you feel like lost luggage that got sent to Jamaica." (Bill Heavey)
And the robins are back where they belong!