flowers for spring + scarecrow creation and maintenance issues

It's been snowing all day and all last night after raining and sleeting yesterday! I don't expect this will be the last snow of the year, given that was after Easter for the past two years (as I'm fond of complaining.

(I'd say spring flowers are one of the few things I miss about Alabama. My parents' hundred-year oak tree, now dearly departed in the mile-wide tornado a few years ago, was surrounded with hydrangea and azalea bushes big enough for me to nearly get lost in when I was about 10-12 and there was a bed of snapdragons and a bed of mixed irises and tigerlilies, plus big daffodils mixed into several of the edging beds and even a few volunteer patches of them out in the yard for a while that my dad would mow around.

(Daffodils are kind of a traditional Easter flower here in the warmest SW corner of Finland - the archipelago -, but it's too cold for them to actually bloom before Easter unless they're grown indoors in pots, which kind of gives the lie to the whole 'symbol of the awakening spring around us' idea, if you're using artificially grown ones because there in fact is no spring awake around you yet except crocuses and brave grass stems. Also the ones for Easter are very tiny, which makes an even more comically bitter contrast to the size and lushness of daffodil blooms that I associate with the season from Alabama.

(I don't prefer floral landscapes or gardens to green ones, but when it comes to flowers, I strongly prefer big tropical flowers to others. This is an unfortunate preference to have in Finland.)

Speaking of gardens, MIL wants to construct scarecrows this summer. I've never been a party to this before, but doesn't making scarecrows' clothes out of actual fabric then result in that fabric mildewing from the rain? If the scarecrow is in your cornfield, fine, you probably don't see it that often. But if we're talking a little kitchen garden and it's much closer to home, it seems to me that it would be more logical to create the appearance of humanity with weather-safe materials of some kind. MIL and Wax both seemed to find this question bizarre and suggested you could undress the scarecrows for the rain and dress them again later? But that seems like an awful lot of trouble to be always remembering, doesn't it, particularly if it's going to rain frequently? Does anybody have scarecrow wisdom to share, or am I going to have to research this and probably end up on a deep dive into whatever corner of the internet contains fanatical scarecrow-making fandom?

the cockroach would have had it by a short head

Lucius Pim was not a man I was fond of — in fact, if I had had to choose between him and a cockroach as a companion for a walking-tour, the cockroach would have had it by a short head — but there was no doubt that he had outlined the right policy. His advice was good, and I decided to follow it.

—PG Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves

the quest for the perfect brown ink redux

When I last wrote about brown fountain pen ink samples, last June, I really had too many of them... or not enough spare easy-to-fill pens lying around... or not enough willingness to dump unused ink out (and do them consecutively, washing the pen in between, I mean), arguably. Ink isn't a precious commodity or anything, so it's just the pure principle of wastefulness that upsets me if I spill it or have to empty it prematurely.

Anyway, that's why it took me that long. That, and I couldn't make up my mind whether to order a new pad of Tomoe River paper or not (I didn't). I loaded a bunch of pens with the first half of the brown ink samples all at once, and then I failed to use all of them up in a timely fashion and didn't have any pens to fill with the second half. Finally this week and last week I've flushed and soaked clean a bunch of pen nibs and filled three pens with the last colors of ink, and made the side-by-side comparison sheet ( here. )