in like a lion, a snow lion

[Illustration coming. Its been busy!]

Woof! Or should I say roar, March has been crazy this year. We had snow in the yard from the January 25-26 storm, that just melted out this week! Mostly, I still have snow on the curb that has THAT snow at the bottom. And this past Tuesday, the Dingo of March, it was 74 degrees F and sunny, and we all sat in the yard.

So I haven't had the heart to write this until it started looking up a little, so even tho we rolled out the new format last year, and we're calling this the planning guide, its nearly the Ides so planning for the first part of the month was presumably don't without this guide. Not sure how you all managed! all three of you who actually read this

Year of the Horse this year, the Fire Horse more precisely. So plans for a cookout on Sunday, the 22, the Horse of March? Just two days after the Equinox, seems like a great way to celebrate Spring! Sun sets at 6:58 PM in Boston, not bad!

Today is Friday the 13th, or the Bat of March. Yes, I believe that is fitting. 

Here it is...

MARCH 2025

March 1, Sunday - Lion: Snow lion?
March 2, Monday - Tiger: 7 different sub-species of panthera tigris
March 3, Tuesday - Bear: Polar bear this year 
March 4, Wednesday - Shark: Surprised the ocean wasn't frozen this year
March 5, Thursday - Wolf: Hunted near to extinction mainly because of their feeding on livestock
March 6, Friday - Bull: Long-horns can have a 6 to 8-foot horn span
March 7, Saturday - Moose: Moose antler can span 4 to 6 feet
March 8, Sunday - Eagle: Bald Eagle wing spans to over 7-feet. Wedge-Tail (Australia) to over 9-feet. Womens Day!
March 9, Monday - Scorpion: The little ones in Italy are jet black, and IN YOUR HOUSE
March 10, Tuesday - Dingo: Are they just feral strays? 74-DEGREES today!
March 11, Wednesday - Hawk: Smaller than eagles, not as slim or pointed as falcons
March 12, Thursday - Lynx: They have tufts of hairs on their ear tips to help fine tune hearing
March 13, Friday - Bat: flying mammals. Like dragons, but dragons are lizards, so... like nothing else?
March 14, Saturday - Monkey: Monkeys have tails, apes don't. HBD Coleen!
March 15, Sunday - Snake: Boas and Pythons still have vestigial pelvic bones.
March 16, Monday - Ox: The plural of Ox is Oxen
March 17, Tuesday - Elephant: According to my son, trunks come in left- and right-handedness
March 18, Wednesday - Raven: Largest of the passerines; perching birds
March 19, Thursday - Stag: Hart, or buck
March 20, Friday - Crab: They got 10 legs! Doesn't seem right. First day of spring! 
March 2, Saturday - Goat: Goat headed  Pagan or gnostic idol Baphomet is the origin of the goat-satan connection
March 22, Sunday - Horse: Part of the Equidae family, along with zebras and asses
March 23, Monday - Pig: The magical animal
March 24, Tuesday - Dog: There are about 200 different dog breeds
March 25, Wednesday - Dolphin: Flipper was a bottlenose dolphin, played on the TV show by 5 different animals
March 26, Thursday - Rooster: One rooster for every ten hens is the rule. Harem say what?
March 27, Friday - Turtle: Leatherback sea turtles can reach 8-feet and 1100 pounds, in metric that's a lot
March 28, Saturday - Toad: they spend more time on the ground but they do like the mud
March 29, Sunday - Robin:  American or Red Breasted Robin (orange!) is a thrush
March 30, Monday - Rabbit: SO much rabbit poop after the snow melted. So much. HBD Kelton!
March 31, Tuesday - Lamb:Easter is just 5 days away! Light the grill

kingdom of copper

This is book 2 of the Daevabad Trilogy by S. A. Chakraborty. I had taken this book out a few weeks ago by mistake, not knowing it was book 2, so I returned it and got the first one. By the time I read that one and returned it, this book was lent out, but through the magic of the inter-library loan program, I got an email a day later that this book had arrived from one of the other libraries in the North of Boston Library Exchange (NOBLE) network. if you haven't been to the library, then go--a few times--and see what they can do

Sometimes the second book in a trilogy feels like filler, or just a bridge between the intro in book 1 and the climax in book 3, but this one didn't feel like that, and I think that is especially nice given that this is the first work of this author, who now goes by her given name Shannon Chakraborty. 

Any great adventure story has something difficult for the protagonist(s) to overcome; the big baddie, the evil plot, the end of the world, and this one is no different. The Kingdom of Copper fleshes out the personalities of the main characters, tests their resolve, and uncovers parts of their personalities that didn't come to light, or at least not so clearly, in the first book. This volume also introduces the big problem. And its much bigger than we were lead to believe in the first book. 

This one ends in an almost literal cliffhanger, so while the idea is that each book in a trilogy can or could be read independent of the others, this one does leave you hanging. But I was also left looking forward to the last book in the trilogy (which I took out from the library at the same time, and I am currently reading!)