Never Trust a Groundhog!

After Puxatawny Phil raised a lot of hopes when he failed to see his shadow a few weeks ago, the promised early spring has yet to break through the ice. In fact, the past couple days have produced snow statewide, particularly in my old stomping grounds, the Puget Sound area. The vast amount of wet, heavy snow that has fallen over there in the past 24 hours is the stuff legends are made of. As we have listened to news reports of impossible travel and abandoned vehicles on I-5, we've actually been feeling a little smug here in NCW. Although daily temps have been frigid overnight and in the mornings, we have been enjoying crystal-clear blue afternoons with lots of sunshine. Many of my friends have even been reporting crocus-sightings, one of the earliest signs of spring around here. Overnight, however, the snow started falling here, and my husband has just surrendered to the siren-song of the snowblower. We really don't have a lot of accumulation, only about 3 inches or so - I hear that Mission Ridge, our local ski resort, enjoyed 14 inches of new, and it continues to fall. I checked the immediate forecast, and it looks like things are going to warm up to "SUNNY" starting tomorrow, and pretty much fair through the weekend.....So maybe spring is on the way, but I doubt very much that it will be here before the Spring equinox on March 20.

At our last meeting of the NCW Dahlia Society, we decided that the time had come for us to develop a website, where communication between the society and our community can be updated and improved. If we are to carry out our mission to promote the growing, showing and enjoyment of dahlias in NCW, we need to find a bigger audience. In spite of the fact that many in town are aware of the gardens we have around town, we still have many people who come to our shows that have NEVER seen dahlias, or know nothing about how to grow them here in NCW. Towards this end,we have retained the services of Angela Richmond, music teacher and technical whiz-kid, to help design and launch our site. She has done a spectacular job so far, and although the site is still under construction, I have no doubt that it will help us to expand our reach far beyond where we have been able to go up until now. It's pretty exciting to imagine the possibilities that exist for us in cyberspace! If you want to see how it looks so far, feel free to drop in at www.ncwdahlias.org

BTW, at Thursday's meeting,we also celebrated the 89th birthday of my beautiful mom, Myrt DeRooy. She has been involved in dahlia societies for about 60 years, longer than any of the rest of us could hope for. According to a folks in Everett and Snohomish that I talked with at the ADS show last year, she was a huge factor in the growth and success of the societies over there. She was one of the real "worker-bees", one who was definitely the "wind beneath the wings" of my well-known dad....Thanks to Mom for everything she has done for us - in the garden, in making a home for all eight of the DeRooy kids and for being such a classy lady! We love you!