Yella! Season

The pine trees are blooming. This has significance in the South, because pine trees make an obscene amount of thick, yellow pollen. Not just yellow, but what we down here call "Yella!"

Little Martha looks like she's been abducted by aliens, had mind-altering experiments conducted on her, and returned, none the worse for the wear but fluorescing gently in the sunlight. Junior the Cat is coated with the Yellow Peril, sneezing and pawing at his eyes. StuffMart is sold out of Visine. My red 'brick' floor is orangeish with it's coat of pollen, and the furniture...*sigh*. I'm not sure I'm even going to bother dusting until the season has passed. It's all oak anyway, so the pollen doesn't really show up until it's thick enough to peel off like a piece of felt.

What's cool, in a B-movie sort of way, is how the wind will toss huge yellow clouds into the air, that settle on cars, roofs, anything standing still. I have to rinse my glasses off several times a day, when I realize everything has a yellow haze.

I am thankful that I am fairly relaxed where housekeeping is concerned. I think someone who is compulsively clean would sit down on the floor and spin in circles "uhbuddauhbuddahomminahommina" because truly, 10 minutes after you get it all up, another layer is down. Better to just leave it alone until the Peril is gone.

While I steadfastly refuse to believe in Global Warming (Don't even bother trying to change my mind. Save your energy), the trees are blooming a mite early. March is more typical, when it's good and windy. Mind you, this has been a very typical winter. (We slept with the windows open last night. It got down to 65). We've had our requisite 4 day cold spell, and will most likely have 2 more before Easter. Then it will be safe to plant green beans and corn. Our days run about 70-75 degrees, and most of the trees and shrubs have sense enough to stay dormant a little longer.

OO! I just thought of something! Maybe, if the pine trees are blooming now, and we have a good frost in a couple of weeks, it will kill all the little pine flowers and we won't have this ridiculous conflagration of pinecones next fall. Pinecones are a pain in the butt, especially if (like me) you have 56 pine trees in your yard.

So, for the next month or so, most everyone in East Georgia will be sneezing (it's not allergies, pine pollen is just BIG, grains the size {almost} of small cars that wedge themseves in your nose and make you sneeze, and have to dig glowing yellow nuclear boogers out). We will all walk around with bottles of saline and Visine to keep our eyes washed, because the pollen will build up on your eyeballs and glue them shut. This is very inconvenient when you're driving or counting change at Sonic.
You have to do a pre-rinse cycle on your laundry, or you wind up with a mess inside your washer, similar to that of running a crayon through the dryer. It's not a permanent mess, easily washed out, but it's just easier to do a prewash.

Put a lid on your cooking food, or you will find additives! Fine for pizza, who can tell, but completely ruinous to the aesthetic of something delicate, like sushi...tho I suppose you could pretend it's supposed to look like that. Here in East Bumfart, no one knows the difference anyway. (A post for another day :Do you really want to eat at a Japanese restaurant where the waitress sez "y'all want sweet tea with that?"?)

So, it's Pine season.It's the price we pay for our climate here.