Spring surprises.

Something wonderful happened when I hopped in the car this morning, but I have to set this all up with events of the preceding 24 hours just so you truly understand. Even though it is only March 11th, spring is creeping in. My neighbor’s bulbs are popping up, and if I remember from last spring, they are grape hyacinth. I have been smelling spring in the air for a few days now. I got to work yesterday with lots of cold rain falling and found two Canadian geese in a pond that forms from rain overflow. They ended up spending the entire day there, in the cold rain, honking, floating, swimming, and standing on one leg. Out my large picture window at work (yes, I appreciate that daily), I saw a chesty robin standing on the grass in the rain. It looked around, gave a little shake to get the water droplets off, flew up into the small tree outside my window, and then flew away. Later in the day, I saw a tiny woodpecker, it was either a downey woodpecker or a hairy woodpecker – do you care what kind of woodpecker it was? Here’s the point where I just chuckle at myself a bit – I think it’s fun and satisfying to learn how to identify different plants and animals. But that’s just one of the fascinating things about me. I’m deep. I am deep. OK really now…as I headed home, I heard the geese honking again in the pond. And near the end of the night, I read a Frog and Toad book to my boys about the changes in seasons and how Frog was looking around the corner for spring, literally…and then we actually talked about spring arriving and how we all have noticed it. So now onto my Wednesday morning. After my mad rush to get out of the house, because my toddler is my alarm clock and we all are still gradually adjusting to the spring ahead, I jumped in the car thinking about what I would listen to super loud on the way to work. Aside from being home with my men, these musical moments in the car to and from work are highlights of my week. And what should I find peaking out from under the driver's seat as I am putting the Netflix envelopes on the other seat and my lunch on the floor? The stack of about 9 CDs that WhoDat gave me last August!!!! Oh wow!! I exclaimed aloud to myself outside, by myself. Or some such nonsense. I had been looking for those CDs for about two months now and couldn’t find them. They were all mixes that WhoDat had done early on when she started DJing. Some of them she had done with her mentor, some on her own. All the music is great – exemplary of Detroit eclecticism! Some of the mixes are seamless, and some of them are not perfect; there are some mismatched moments in there. And she gave them all to me knowing all that. She gave me the mistakes so that I could learn from them – homework. And she was right, I did learn from them. There is this one eighties mix – and not a typical eighties mix, but like a Detroit 80s mix. It’s funky, goes across many genre boundaries, and has a Wham! song on it, which is how I realized I was missing the stack of CDs. I wanted to hear WhoDat’s tweaking of the song, which is “Everything She Wants.” Hot song, but even better in her mix. And I’ve never heard this song sound so good…and I’m listening to it on my used navy blue minivan regular old sound system that I drive alone to work guzzling gas like a loser, but it’s only because them’s the only wheels we got, and it's me and four dudes to tote around! And,… And…the sun is shining, the sky is blue with clouds blown across it, the temperature was 36 F as I was driving, and spring is here. I love winter, love the white fluffy snow that when it first falls, makes everything seem so quiet and still. But after this long Detroit winter, I am so ready for no coats, no mits, no more heat woes, and just being outside with my dudes. It’s going to be another great spring!

Oh yeah, and now Pandora, which sometimes pisses me off, keeps playing M.I.A. So I'm straight!