I have never been accused of being an optimist.

It's not that I don't want to see the best in people, believe all my decisions will be the right ones, look on the sunny side, hope for the best, glass half full, etc. I just think of myself as a pragmatist. And for every positive platitude, there is a counter-platitude. Such as, well, Murphy's Law.

On both Saturday and Sunday I grabbed my photo gear and went out for some long walks. I didn't see a lot, but did manage to make a few pinhole camera photos, with my store-bought and my home-made (will post later if anything turns out) cameras. But before I even left my property I noticed that my rhubarb plants had poked through the surface. That's three days after an eight-inch snowfall.

So that gave me a little boost, maybe spring will come, maybe it will warm up and maybe I'll be making a delicious rhubarb pie before June.

Hope springs eternal.

SIDEBAR: In 1987, I had just moved to Birmingham, Alabama. My wife and I went to the local grocers in the spring and actually found rhubarb. Taking it up to the checkout, the girl grabbed it, looked at it a bit and said, "what is this, celery?"
Canon G9, Aperture priority at f8. Three exposures, two steps apart, processed as "HDR" tone mapping in Photomatix Pro.