ROUS

I was working from home yesterday when something caught my eye in the back yard (which my office overlooks). It was a massive opossum trundling along the back fence! It walked right up to my neighbor's fluffy white cat, Romeo, who tends to hang out in our back yard. Romeo took one look at the 'possum -- which was about the same size as he is -- and hightailed it out of there. By the time I grabbed my camera and unlocked the door to the back porch, the (non-)Rodent Of Unusual Size had made its way into Romeo's yard -- just to add insult to injury, I'm sure -- but I did manage to snap a rather blurry photo with my crappy camera. (The gray, rainy weather didn't help much, either.)
The good news is that my dear husband bought me a fancy new digital camera for my birthday, so once I figure out how to use it, I should be able to post higher-quality photos here. If they still look bad, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm just a terrible photographer...

In other news, we finally gave our twice-postponed green renovation presentation at our neighborhood civic association meeting on Monday. The president had attended one of our open houses last fall and was impressed enough to ask us to put together a presentation for the January meeting in hopes that we might inspire some of our neighbors to green their homes as well. Unfortunately, a series of rather scary crimes in our otherwise very safe neighborhood led them to postpone it so the county police could come to the meeting and respond to questions.

That gave us a little more time to prepare, but when the February meeting rolled around, there was 3 feet of snow on the ground. Only a handful of people were willing to brave Snowmageddon to come to the meeting, and we discovered we didn't have the correct adaptor to connect my Mac laptop to the projector. We gave a brief talk for the hardy souls in attendance and agreed to give it another try at the March meeting.

This time we came prepared not only with a handout and the right adaptor, but with Steve W (our builder) and Marta (our architect) to help answer questions. The turnout was much better -- about 30-40 people -- and there were no further technical difficulties. After another talk by the local police -- this time on child safety & technology -- we showed some before & after photos and floor plans, and then briefly went over the green features of the house (with more photos, of course). We spent 15-20 minutes answering questions -- with help from Marta and Steve -- and the meeting was adjourned around 10 pm. Steve and Marta both acted like proud parents afterwards -- they said we did a great job with the presentation and were impressed with how much we had learned over the past couple years. They chatted with a few of our neighbors after the meeting, so maybe they'll get some new clients in exchange for giving up a Monday evening to sit through a 2-hour civic association meeting.

Believe it or not, the opossum made another appearance while I was sitting here typing, so I grabbed my NEW camera and snapped a couple photos. It is even more gray and rainy than yesterday, but the new camera has a much better zoom and deals better with low light. The critter is about the same distance from me as it was in the previous photo, so you can see the difference! Too bad he chose to hang out in the corner of our yard that's full of junk from our long-gone garage. It's not very pretty -- but then neither is the possum...
As for the snow, it still remains in spots where it had been plowed up into giant mountains -- particularly in parking lots -- but the last little bit disappeared from our yard on Thursday, and now the spring bulbs are starting to make an appearance. Sadly, that's not the end of the precipitation -- we've had several days of rain and more to come. The Potomac is so high that it has flooded its banks in several places. I hope we'll get to see the sun again soon!