Spring Signage

Whenever spring arrives here the air changes, a certain type of shrub blooms for a couple of weeks, and of course the spiders come back to set up house:



I like the spiders. I know most people find them creepy, but their webs are beautiful and I think of them as Nature's exterminators. They also eat most of the mosquitos that will be arriving between now and summer, never a bad thing.

Every spring I also haul out a UFO (unfinished object) quilt project and try to finish it, and sometimes when I dig through my sewing stuff I find something that I forgot I didn't finish. I have to wait for my new glasses to come in, but when they do I've decided I'm going to finally finish Snow here, who has been waiting for a couple years now for me to get on with it:



Spring also often brings some weird new critter trying to invade our property. Most of the time it's a bug (one memorable year we discovered the porch was infested with black widows) but 2015 appears to be the year of the tussock moth catepillar:



I've never seen these around here before this year, and some quick research revealed that contact with this catepillar's hairs can cause allergic skin reactions. Our kid is particularly sensitive to any kind of insect venom, so we are removing them from close proximity to the house. We've also spotted several buck moth catepillars, with whom any contact inflicts a horrible welt that hurts for days (and I can personally attest to it being worse than a burn from a hot iron) so we're disposing of them without any regrets whatsoever.

What surprises has spring brought to your corner of the planet? Let us know in comments.