Wow, do we ever have daylight again. One day you’re driving to and from work in the dark at 30 or 40 below, and seemingly the next day the darkness is gone and the temperatures are into the teens and twenties. It adds up fast when day length is increasing by seven minutes a day. And today, although it was snowing again when we woke up, our days just became longer than everyone to the south of us. We’ll still have snow and good cross-country skiing for weeks yet, but you can once again feel the sun’s warmth, a true harbinger of melt and greenery to come. That said, we had some spectacular northern lights over the weekend.

The fact that it’s so light out sort of wakes you up from a winter’s slumber. Maybe it’s the now-visible scenery, or maybe it’s the enhanced slipperiness of ice-covered roads as it warms up (or both), but there have been a lot of cars going into ditches these days. Many of them seem to be on straightaways, and the tracks just plow spectacularly right off into the ditch. Trying to learn from others’ mistakes, I find myself paying closer attention to staying on the road.

At home there’s enough light to enjoy the birds coming to the feeder. During most of the winter this all happens during the short days while you’re at work. But now you need to look fast, because there are hordes of pigpolls out there sucking down bird seed so fast that we’re rationing the greedy things. Hulled sunflower seeds are expensive, and these guys have usually licked the feeder clean by 10:00 a.m. Last weekend we doubled up their rations and they still had the feeder cleaned out by early afternoon. Pigs. On Saturday afternoon, while I was busy reading for Monday’s class and Rose was working elsewhere in the house, I heard this incessant irregular banging that just kept going on and on. “What on earth is she doing?” I thought to myself. While, unbeknownst to me, Rose was thinking “What on earth is he doing?” I finally got up to see if I could help her with whatever it was that was causing such a racket, and as I got downstairs to the back of the house I realized that it was our hanging bird feeder banging against the house. Imagine my surprise when I got to the window to see a yearling moose standing there on the deck practically wearing the feeder on its head as it snaked its tongue all around trying to pick up every scrap of bird seed remaining in every corner. Rose arrived at about the same time, and we got a good laugh out of watching this furry standup comic making sure there was nothing left in that feeder. It’s quite a sight when you’re only a couple of feet away, and the remaining scraps of seed were too enticing for the moose to be overly concerned with audience members standing there in the window. We’d seen this moose hanging out on the deck a few times this winter, but this is the first time that any moose has figured out the bird feeder. Unfortunately for the moose, the pigpolls don’t leave much behind.

Spring semester is so busy it gets insane. The days of increasing light also seem to be coupled with increasingly long work hours, with little time off. This evening I had a few spare minutes before leaving work and tried to clean off a little of my desktop, which has become a minefield of piles of stuff falling over, most of it too important to toss out and all of it requiring as-yet unfound time to file and deal it with appropriately. I’d been reaching over the tops of two of these piles to type for a couple weeks, and that wasn’t doing my arms and wrists any favors. Anyway, I was dealing with one of these piles when the too-much-time-at-work light began blinking on my mental dashboard and I happened to pick up an article I’d printed out from The New York Times from 3 August 1904 (no, it had not been in this pile since then; you’ll just have to take my word on that). The headline was “Aged Ornithologist Found Dead in Office.” Not only was Jacob Studer “Stricken While Asleep Among Books,” he lived in his office. Oh, and “Besides His Books on Birds, He Had Written a History of Columbus, Ohio.” (It’s too long a story to relate why I’d found this article, but it sure made me laugh at the time, so I’d printed it out and added another thin sedimentary layer to a teetering pile.) Fun guy, old Jake. I hustled on home, not wishing to have inadvertently discovered a role model.

How did I get time to scratch this rambling piece out? Well, Rose went to see a movie with some friends, so I have a few minutes to contemplate the equinox, my navel, and the things that get in the way of enjoying both. Too much work does come to mind, a thought enhanced by good ol’ Jake’s obituary. I declined the offer to go see the movie, Les Miserables, because I’d accidentally read a review of it. Scott Adams, the cartoonist (Dilbert) and blog writer, wrote one of the best movie reviews I’ve ever read (his 14 January 2013 entry). This one caught my attention with things like “…it’s the sort of movie that makes your mind try to crawl out of your ear hole in search of anything that isn’t the movie.” I decided I’d stay home. Equinox, navel, equinox, navel….