Spring Things

Some things I love to hear in spring:
Pulsating sprinklers. The DoD schools I went to on Puerto Rico (and the Golf Club near where we lived on Lighthouse Drive) and in Washington state (at Moses Lake) had humongous, movable sprinkler heads on miles of metal conduit, and they made the most wonderful sound in summer as I swung on the giant swingsets.
Hummingbirds fighting each other off the feeders. Three days ago, having seen a tiny hummer inspecting our empty feeders, Mo filled two of them more than half full, and the mob descended on us. I need two more feeders at least, and I'm thinking of using my credit balance at a certain mail-order greenhouse to plant more Salvia Ostfreilandii.
Hawks hunting. At least two adult redtailed hawks and perhaps a broad-winged pair have nested in the three giant stone pines on our north property line. The hawk calls you hear in movies are generally single, drawn-out imitations of the repetitive, raucous short real calls, meant to scare some small thing into moving so the hawk can stoop on it and feast.
My wind chimes. I collect James W. Stannard tuned wind chimes. On a windy spring day, our porch sounds like the middle of a fairy spell, all tinkling major arpeggios in the high range ... which Mo can't hear, thanks to 20 years of jet engines and heavy equipment, pre-hearing protection. He can hear the bamboo chimes I bought, which hang from the Fresno handle at the southeast corner of the garden; he says they sound like a beer-can alarm on a fence.

Something I hate to hear in spring:
Tax attorneys and the TV talking heads browbeating Americans with threats and implied threats about what can happen if you don't pay taxes.
I'd be willing to bet that the IRS pays co-op for the tax attorneys' ads; and of course, being the hidden arm of the U.S. enforcement triad, it's never going away unless we follow Boutros Boutros-Ghali's advice about dealing with bureaucracies. The IRS cannot be attacked with any of the redress avenues by which any other government agency is assailable: People who have not paid taxes for years as a protest against what the government is doing with their hard-earned stolen funds are no longer dignified by the title "protestors;" they're now going to be termed (ready, media talking heads?) "tax defiers." Protesting what your government is doing by withholding the money that allows them to do it is no longer a First Amendment option, folks.

Even if you're really, really smart, deciding that you will not pay for idiocy is now illegal. You can't even say, "Look -- I'm really, really smart; if I can't make sense of the tax code, how can the average person?" That must just make too much sense to be allowed; if one person did it, everybody might.