Spring has sprung!

Okay, so I can finally admit that Spring is officially here now. Yeah, the trees & whatnot around the yard have been doing the flowering & leafy thing for a few weeks now, and the grass (weeds) have begun to grow again. The temps have been mild, growing warmer and it's rained quite a bit. I even saw a few deer wandering across the yard last week. I even opened the windows and turned off the switch for the gas heat, stopped wearing a sweat shirt and opted for the old baggy t-shirt instead.
But in my mind, yesterday's events really marked the beginning of Spring. It was a warm day & the weather babbling on tv was all about the approaching storms that they'd been going on about for two days already. It was a fairly narrow band of nasty looking thunderstorms showing on radar that stretched from Texas nearly up to the Great Lakes. They'd been saying this was going to start affecting Middle Tennessee by Thursday, but here it was, Friday afternoon and still not anything happening around here except for the wind picking up nicely.
I'm playing couch potato.....shuddup....watching one of the channels that never broadcasts anything but it's scheduled programs (no sudden announcements) and it's time for them to switch to the news, which happens to be for Chicago and I'm not much interested. So this is when I change to the area news for around here....well.....sort of around here but it's really for Nashville. I'm figuring to coast thru an hour of it before I change to some afternooon comedy stuff and it helps me avoid that stupid Tyra Banks that wastes air time from noon to one.
But the news is non-stop warnings about the storms that have finally started arriving and it's not good. Seems there are tornadoes predicted and at least one has already touched down near the Kentucky border. I watch the radar with all the fancy, new 3-D imaging which is supposed to be able to see the formations almost down to the ground.....but the weather folks seem fascinated with it, even though they don't completely have the hang of how to interpret it yet and keep switching back to the usual systems to see if what they're saying matches up.
Anyway, there are suddenly signs of tornadic activity about 50 miles southwest of where I live and heading northeast. Then the reports start coming in about damage to homes and buildings all along the path the storm cell is taking. Before too much longer the system seems to be approaching my county, but so far, no warnings are issued for us. Then that changes and one is called for here....a couple of minutes later the town warning sirens starts wailing, which I'd never be able to hear if I didn't happen to have a window open.
Mind you, it still hasn't rained a drop at my house and the winds keep picking up, then dying down completely. The non-stop chatter from the weather babblers keeps talking about egg-sized hail and winds of 100mph, so when it finally does start to rain here, I'm looking out the windows to see if there is any hail....but I got nothing. Now the warning from tv is saying the arrival time for here is 2pm...and this tidy bit of info is given at 1:57 but I've already seen some flashes of lightning and the UPS for my computer has beeped several times from the power surges and the cable has gone off and on twice.
Now they are suddenly talking about damage to an area about 5 miles west and just slightly north of my house and that a possible tornado is passing by. I'm ready to head for my bathroom in the basement, but all of sudden there is nothing.....no rain, no wind, even the sky seems less cloudy. Yep...you guessed it....passed me right on by a few miles to the north.
It rained pretty hard a few more times and one more warning for this county was issued but got cancelled in about 5 minutes when the swirling formations to the south just fell apart and zipped off to the east without getting any closer.
I opened the window again, went out on the front porch to look for any trees blown over, but the only thing I saw was one fairly small limb down on the driveway by my neighbor's house.
So I settle into one of the rockers on the porch for a while....just watching the wind pick up a little every so often and an occasional bit of rain, one of the cats snuggled on my lap. First time this year I've sat down out there. The birds are singing and I spot a little movement off by the power line....it's a blue bird! Then a couple minutes later a hummingbird shows up at one of their feeders....of course they are all empty and nasty from hanging there all this past fall and winter....so I get rewarded with what I can only assume is a nasty look and he zooms off. Being the sucker I am, I got up and took one of the feeders inside to clean it up and go thru the mixing up of sugar water routine and hang it back up. Several minutes later the hummer is back but gets chased off by another one. One of them came back later, but didn't seem like he was finding the one feeder I'd fixed up.....but I'm not getting sucked in like I did last year. That time I cleaned and filled all six of them but only saw one hummer for the next three months and ended up having to go thru it again when the rest of the flock finally started showing up in July. I wonder if seeing the first one this early is some kind of record.
But now Spring is here....first tornado, first hummingbird, first bluebird and first day sitting on the porch....all in the same day. Of course, the prediction for Sunday is a low overnight of 34 degrees....go figure!