Item #1: Happy birthday
. . . to those few of you born on 2/29/XX
Image is attributed to here: holidayscalendar . com/event/leap-day,
but does not seem to be on the page — just text about the day.
Along about Tuesday of this week, our Daffodils poked through the cold soil. Still cold at night and snow, low probability, is in the forecast.
Item #2: Industrial or artistic? 
One aspect of rural living is that you have to have a means of heating your home and, maybe, using gas appliances. Our nearest neighbor has a tank that looks like the one in the photo, except hers is surrounded by shrubs and trees. Not so everyone.
I was reading an article about a house that used propane and the owners had painted their tank to look like a yellow submarine.
There are many dozens of photos on line. I searched with this string of words: colorful paintings propane tanks
Three are combined here:
Watermelon, mama raccoon {on top} & 3 inside, and a butterfly
If looking at “painted” tanks doesn’t waste enough time, search with this string: hiding propane tanks
Some repeats.
Item #3: ‘something else is at play’
Here is the full quote:
“We don’t know why he started shooting at the trooper, we don’t know why he barricaded himself into a heavily wooded area, we don’t know why he fired as many shots as he fired,” Mead said. “To be willing to fire as many shots as he fired and go to the extent he went to escape apprehension
leads me to suspect something else is at play – what that is I have no idea.”
I hope Capt. Ron Mead of the Washington State Patrol will let us know the rest of this story. Redmond is 10 miles northeast of Seattle.
Item #4: When pigs fly.
We do not watch MSNBC but a few people do. It was noted that with a story about a record high temperature on the Antarctic Peninsula that extends northward toward South America, the TV person interviewed someone named Kendra. When she stated this event was “not great for the animals that live in Antarctica”, MSNBC flashed a photo of Polar Bears.
Uh-oh! Pigs fly.
Polar Bears are great swimmers so just maybe that pair was on vacation.
{ A hat tip to Jim Steele, Director emeritus of San Francisco State’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus.}
Jim writes that the temperature was the result of a down-slope wind (like a Chinook), and the temperature dropped again. Naming and explanation, also föhn
And that, for this week, is the not so nasty news.
John