I need to take pictures when the sun is out so on days like today when the rain pours all day long I can remember the sun. According to the National Weather Service, Seattle had 5 hours in all of May when it was 70ºF or higher. In a normal year there are 80 to over a 100 hours of 70ºF weather in May. So you can see how off we are this year.

What do the spiders think of all this cool, rainy weather? They can always crawl into a crack to escape the steady rain drops.

Snow waits patiently on her nest, waiting for her eggs to hatch. She picked a perfect place to hide.

When it isn’t pouring rain, I do like to let the chickens enjoy the nice weather. Do they compare this spring with sunny springs from years past?

On a totally, not a man and his hoe type of topic, with all the horrific shootings happening recently, I decided to get the latest numbers on gunfire deaths in Japan. And for that I turned to a reliable source, the National Police Agency of Japan. So these are the statistics for gunfire deaths in Japan from 2017 through 2021. The English labels for the rows is on the right.

The figure that popped out to me was that in all of 2021 there was just one death by gunfire in all of Japan. If the US had the same ratio of gunfire deaths, there would have been just 3 deaths by gunfire in the US during all of 2021. The number of gunfire homicides in the US during 2021? 19,384. A far cry from 3.

The goal of the National Police Agency of Japan is to have zero gunfire deaths. They are almost there.

Letting children get gunned down in elementary schools is a choice not an inevitability. Some countries choose to let this happen, others do not.