I’m sure you’ve heard the adage, April showers bring May flowers. This year, however, April has been snowy and bitterly cold. We should be seeing temps in the high single digits (that’s high 40’s for my fellow Americans), but we’ve had temperatures fall as low as -14C (that’s about 7 Fahrenheit). There have been no April showers, just big dumps of snow.

When the sun did manage to peak out, the puppers and I made sure we got out for walkies. And it appears the neighbourhood birds were just as eager to get out as we were.

Chickadees are the most common bird in my area. Their chattering calls echo from the forests. How-ever-in-the-world such a tiny bird can make so much noise is beyond me.

And the downy woodpeckers are out looking for bugs. Good luck, little guy. It’s too cold for many bugs.

I also spotted this sparrow building a nest in a neighbour’s trusses.

These past few weeks have been weird. There have been several nights where I’ve had to wake up and check my phone to see what day it was, or what day tomorrow would be. My ‘weekdays’ mean my alarm went off and I got up, assuming it was a work day. What day it was exactly, sometimes I didn’t know. I just got up and did whatever!

The only good thing about working from home is an odd thing probably unique to me. I suffer from secondary insomnia as a by-product of my anxiety. Those days when I’m tossing and turning at 3 AM can now be spent on the couch playing repetitive games until I get tired again, and I don’t have to worry about the 6 AM hangover. But now that we’re going past a month in isolation, I’d much rather have the no-sleep-hangover and go to work tired if I can leave my freaking house!

The cabin fever is real, yo! I’ve always thought I was a homebody. That was, until I had no choice. Now I’m pacing in front of the window, wandering back and forth through the house, organizing my sock drawer . . . I’m going insane.

Thankfully Mother Nature took pity on us poor folk and gave us one . . . count them ONE . . . day of seasonal temperatures. Beautiful clear skies and t-shirt weather drew us out of our homes for a day. We shielded our eyes from that giant ball of nuclear explosions in the sky and waded through streets that turned to rivers. All signs pointed to spring once again returning . . .

Until frickin’ Mother Nature dropped half a foot of snow on us the next day! I swear, there’s a conspiracy going on around here. “Let’s see how cray-cray the peeps go if we tease them with “normal” weather, but then BOOM! go full tyrant on them!.

Life is not normal, and neither is the weather in these times. End of days, indeed.

Hopefully next week will be better. Fingers crossed!

– Rissa