April Fools & Pig’s First Birthday

It’s officially April – time for some of that Spring weather!

If that photo doesn’t look much like Spring to you, then we are both in agreement.

Unfortunately the weather has decided to pull ye olde’ April fools joke on us and instead of Spring, April has so far felt like a rapid-fire transition from October to December, including everything from high winds, cold rainstorms, and yep, a bunch of snow. What has made this even worse is that not only has the weather been oh-so-not-Spring, the temperature is following in kind, with temperatures in the teens overnight and wind chills down in the single digits – in April.

Making all of this worse is the fact that just last week we had temperatures in the high 60s with glorious sunshine.

But come the beginning of April things went downhill fast. For starters, on Saturday it pretty much rained all day and was cold and windy – it felt so much like October that during my run my brain struggled to conceptualize the fact that it wasn’t October. That said, maybe running in the rain was a bit of motivator, because I did break my speed record in spite of it.

And yeah, just in case you were wondering, that is a “burst” speed, there is no way in hell I could maintain 15.2mph – even if my legs weren’t messed up.

After a long rainy day on Saturday, we woke up to snow on Sunday!

It wasn’t too heavy, and while it was still coming down it wasn’t anything crazy.

That said, I wasn’t thrilled about any snow, so this was enough. I can’t complain too much though, last I saw we had only received less than one third the amount of snow this year as we did last year. And it’s also not as bad for April as it could be, such as in 1997 when Boston received it’s “April Fools Day Blizzard” which dumped 24.5″ of snow on the city.

Plus, at least one person in our household was happy about the state of affairs.

The good news is that by Sunday afternoon things had calmed down. The bad news is that they got even worse come Monday morning.

I wasn’t as pleased as Valentino, especially since I had to go out in it. Snow is much more pleasant from inside a warm building – except for Valentino, who wants to be outside in it. But alas, duty calls. So I was off into the urban wilderness and quickly realized that it was very cold, in addition to snowing.

At this point the wind wasn’t too bad and the roads were still pretty clear, it was mainly just the pedestrian commute that was impacted.

But like most snow-storms it got worse before it got better.

Before too long even the roads were starting to see some snow creeping inwards.

Y April, y u do dis.

Fortunately, almost as if recognizing the dumb weather outside, the law school gave me  a free lunch.

And then I even got some free coffee during my first class.

Outside things started to look a little better.

Only to get worse again.

And then the wind picked up (why do SB and I keep living in windy places?).

Which made the walk home lots of “fun,” but at least it wasn’t dark at 5pm anymore. Plus this wasn’t one of my late nights, which was also nice.

From what I’m reading we got about 4.7″ of snow, so it was definitely accumulating.

Ah yes, another gorgeous winter day.

Except it’s April. This is most decidedly not how I envisioned my commutes home in April.

But again, not everyone was perturbed, some of us were quite happy.

Quite happy indeed.

The next day saw the grey skies vacate the premises, but don’t be too deceived, it got bitterly cold.

Yes, that crisp air brought with it temperatures in the single digits when you factored in the wind chill, and since this is Boston you always factor in the wind chill.

However, despite Tuesday being a very cold and busy day which included everything from a doctor appointment to a presentation to on call hours, it was still a very exciting day.

Why?

It was Pig’s first birthday!

Pig in the cowboy hat he decided would also serve as his birthday hat, likely starting a tradition.

Yes, April 5th marked the one year anniversary of Pig coming to live with us. He arrived on Easter 2015, and since Easter is funky and moves around each year, we couldn’t just keep his birthday as Easter, so we locked it in as April 5th.

A photo of Pig’s “arrival” from Easter 2015.

[In case you were wondering, Tristen’s birthday is 12/23, Valentino’s is 2/14, and Pig’s is 4/5]

Pig is a yogi, like a major yogi – and aside from keeping his best buddy Pigsten in line, he is very chill. As such he didn’t ask for much on his birthday, and he actually tried to give SB a present on his birthday because he didn’t fully understand what a birthday was (he is only 1 after all). So, like all our children (even Tristen) Pig is low-maintenance when it comes to special days. All he asked for was dirt pudding, which everyone kind of agreed was an awesome idea.

We also decided to get some Subway for dinner, since we had gift cards AND a coupon.

We even saved some more money because I’d gotten chips from the law school – if it wasn’t obvious there is a fairly large stream of free noms flowing forth from HLS.

After dinner we got started on the dirt pudding.

It had been years since I’d had dirt pudding and I’m honestly not sure if I’d ever made it, so it was a fun adventure with Pig assisting. I sort of just cabbaged together the parts of some recipes I found online that I thought sounded the best and went with it, it’s kind of hard to “mess up” dirt pudding after all.

The end result was a hit with everyone, especially Pig – he was a huge fan of the gummy worms grubs.

And the good news is that since dirt is cheap (actually dirt pudding is not so cheap) we had plenty of left overs!

Pig moments before plunging into the dirt pudding in search of more gummy grubs – and also wrecking half the kitchen.

After our dinner, Jeopardy, and dirt pudding, we all settled in for a few episodes of Adventure Time, pretty much the favorite show in this household.

So, while I don’t think Pig would have been disappointed in any scenario involving dirt pudding, I believe everyone enjoyed the day, even if it was way too cold outside for April. All in all, a good first birthday for Pig!

Then the next day we went to this year’s Public Interest Auction, which, while both SB and I agreed wasn’t quite as good as last year’s (which was put on by my class – so obviously no bias there) it was still a lot of fun and provided us with free food and drinks (the beer selection was crap this year [only Bud Light], but the wine was apparently better – not that I care too much, free is free).

And you can never go wrong with Professor Zittrain as an auctioneer.

Now, let’s just hope that Spring actually decides to show up! Today it’s a bit less cold and is raining again, so I guess that’s “improvement.”

Until next time,
-Taco