Spring is finally here

September 1 is the first day of Spring in the Southern Hemisphere, so today we finally begin the trek back to summer and away from our long, cool, and very wet winter. It’s none too soon, either: I’m sick of it raining most days, heavily quite a few days, and the resulting puddles out on the lawn and a sound very much like walking on a saturated sponge when walking on the grass.

The graphic above is a screengrab of the message Facebook gave me this morning, which is similar to what they did for the start of summer on December 1 last year. However, this season’s message was animated: Flowers—or, at least, that’s what I assume they are—flew out of the bicycle’s basket, the two figures pedalled, coasting party of the way, and the dog was running.

Spring isn’t erxactly my favourite season—summer is—but what I like about it is observing the temperatures rising and the weather stabilising—eventually. Over the next couple months the weather will be all over the place, with some days warm and sunny and others very cool and rainy. The fact that our Spring can be so cold and wet is probably one of the reasons I appreciate summer so much.

Last week we had sunny, warmish, pleasant days from Monday through to Friday, when the rain returned for several days. Wednesday and Thursday of this week were sunny, though the heavy rains returned at night. This morning was absolutely beautiful, with sunshine and warm temperatures. I thought about going to the harbour’s edge to take photos, but decided to hang some washing outside first and check my email. That’s when I saw the Facebook thing, and not long after that the skies had fully clouded over, and it rained shortly after that (I got the washing in right before the rain started). The rest of the afternoon alternated between sunny and cloudy, and was never as nice as it had been in the morning.

And that was my welcome to Spring.

I’ll be very busy next week, so I don’t know how much I’ll get to enjoy Spring if the weather is nice, or how much time I’ll have for blogging. This is a problem.

When I last talked about making my blogging goal for this year, I said I needed an average of 1.4 posts per day to meet the annual total of 365 posts. What I didn’t say is that when I first started tracking my progress, the average was 1.37 posts per day. It’s now 1.53. Maybe I jinxed it by talking about it in July.

Still, it’s the start of a new season, the weather will improve, and there’s an election in three weeks. Anything could happen—so much promise, and that's the best part of Spring.

This is the animation in the middle of the Facebook greeting: