It must be spring...

...'cause the calendar says so. The weather, not so much.

But at least it was sunny today, and hadn't rained or snowed since Wednesday, and it is April, so we had to act like it was spring. Therefore, we went to Gloucester, where I planted the first crop of snap peas and lettuce, plus some "heirloom poppies" whose seed packet said "plant outdoors in earliest spring". Good luck to them.

Started to do some of the spring cleanup of the garden -- removing dead stalks from last year's plants, etc. -- there's plenty more of that still to do. jwg found unplanned things to do, as usual; for one thing, it turned out that some sequence of failures had caused the tarp over the woodpile to be torn from its moorings, so that required some retying and some rerigging and I don't know what all.

Then I had wondered aloud if the new tomato bed we'd put in last year, which gets a lot more sun than the old one but isn't quite big enough, should be expanded this spring before it's time to put tomatoes in it. jwg thought it should, but we both said it wasn't going to happen today. So the next thing I know, there he is with the spade and the grub-hoe, ripping out wild blackberries and trying to remove the remnants of a small cherry tree, whose roots turned out to be trapped under a very large rock. The rock has been moved, the tree remnants are going to wait till next time.

Combine this with the facts that I started the indoor seeds earlier this week and that the Red Sox have played four games already, and I suppose it must really be spring, whatever the weather might think.

More about spring, calendric and otherwise

Back when I was a mere child, baseball season started in the middle of April. But these days, between the fact that they play more games and that the postseason goes on for a whole month, they've forced themselves to start right at the beginning of April.

This is, shall we say, problematic in many of the venues in which the game is played, as can be seen from a quick survey of the number of games postponed this week not just because of rain, but because of serious snow and/or bitter cold. (You can find out susandennis's opinoin on the subject here.) It's clear that there are places that they simply shouldn't attempt to play baseball before April 15th.

As it turns out, however, there are exactly enough baseball venues in each league to play a full set of games without risking the interference of winter (this includes both places sufficiently far south or west to be safe and domed stadiums).

So it's obvious to anyone with a brain (a category which, as much experience demonstrates, does not include the people who make up the MLB schedule) that all games in the first half of April should be played in the following places:
( winter-safe baseball cities )

Bud Selig, are you listening?