In sickness and in health

I have just experienced my first major bout of illness in 2 years - I got hit by some sort of virus that has been doing the rounds in Kuopio, and had a high temperature, stomach pain, an unbelievable headache and lost my voice for about 4 days. This latter was the most annoying when trying to phone up to cancel things - as I tried to speak, in a kind of sub-bear language, there was usually perplexed silence on the other end of the phone. The other annoyance is that I was supposed to do one of my main exams today - in singing, and have had to postpone it 'cos there's no way I can sing like this! My dear other half had the same thing about a month ago, but I sincerely hope the kids don't succumb.
We have been at plus degrees for some time now, and have over fifteen hours of daylight. The snow, as you can see, has melted really quickly, and the flowers have followed on into bloom already. We're now starting to think about garden landscaping, with the first step removal of the tree stump, and two other old ones, which will give us an idea of the amount of soil over the bedrock that we have to play with.