All the fruit trees are blooming…

Asian Pears, Apples, Plums.

And they’re everywhere – en masse on rolling hillsides, clumped on the sides of the roads and planted in the front & backyards of every home.

And the smell is divine.

While he may cause some of you to squirm, Stanley is not in fact a rat.

He’s a field mouse…as in this field…

….or this field…

…or any one of the umpteen other fields that surround our neighborhood.

Anjung-Ri is a sprawling little agricultural community and the reality is it comes with all kinds of characters…including Stanley.

The field mice nestled up in all the hay that was left in the fields over the winter.

And now that the farmers are out getting their fields ready…

…they’ve all been forced out.

And since they’re not interested in the early onion crops, it means they’ll seek out seeds elsewhere.

Like my backyard.

Our internet has been down for the past two days.

Well, up & down & down & down & up & right back down & down & down.

So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it stays up long enough for me to get this post up!

But our little backyard farmer hired a crew to bale all his left-over hay from the rice harvest last fall.

It was amazing to watch these guys keep throwing the bales higher & higher as they kept piling it on.

I’m guessing the next step will be to burn part of the field (as almost everyone else already has) & then either

a) they’ll hire someone to come flood the field, or

b) just let mother nature take her course.

But I can tell you this…

when I arrived in mid-May of last year, this was

ONE…GIANT…MUD…PUDDLE!

Tomorrow morning Eric & I will be up with the chickens.

Well…at least the roosters.

We’re leaving the rural farmlands of Anjung-Ri and hopping a USO bus down to the coast to Jinhae for their annual Cherry Blossom Festival.

Jinhae is about 5 – 6 hours away, home to a US Naval base & has over 200,000 cherry trees in full bloom just waiting to help me completely forget about Winter & celebrate Spring.

So I’ll be offline tomorrow & will be sure to post on Sunday (my time).

We’ll be making at least a couple of pit-stops along the way – so I’m keeping my fingers crossed we’ll run into another rest stop with the fully electronic toilets.

This time I’ll be ready…This time the buttons won’t overwhelm me…And this time…I’ll push them all!

Happy Weekend!

Here’s a closer, fuzzier look…

My personal opinion is she’s surveying her dominion, taking stock & thinking,

‘M-m-m-m-mmman, that’s a l-l-llllot of r-r-r-rrrice to pl-pl-pl-plant….’

That’s all folks!

[apologies to my international readers who may not get the Porky Pig reference]

Happy Easter!