Summer in April?!?!

Seriously. This weather has been straight ridiculous lately. I'm definitely enjoying it, although as I've said before, I really hope that we eventually hit a plateau. I'm dreading what we'll see in July if these temperatures keep rising (although we're supposed to "cool down" to the sixties this week, so that'll be a nice change).

Over the weekend, though, we had temperatures like this:

For the record, I'm the one taking the picture from the passenger seat. I can't say for sure what Darrell is doing, other than clearly not focusing on the road 

Since we actually had a mostly free weekend for once, we decided to spend some time together and take advantage of the nice weather. First on the agenda was some biking:

The trails in Sioux Falls were pretty busy, as we certainly weren't the only ones enjoying the weather. In fact, we were enjoying it so much that we ended up biking for about ten miles, which resulted in some sore butts the next day and a little bit of this:

Who knew you could get sunburned in South Dakota in March/April?!?!

Then it was off to Menards so we could get started on a few projects around the house, namely gardening. After all, with weather like we've been having, it's hard not to be itching to get our garden started!

It's a little early yet to get anything planted outside (we have gotten snow in April before, so there's always that concern), but we got our tomatoes and peppers started and picked up the seeds for the rest of our plants.

Even though we only had mediocre success last year, I'm excited to try my green thumb again. And I may have gotten a little over-ambitious about trying some new things as well, so we'll see how that goes (Darrell may have reined me in on a few other vegetables that I also wanted to try citing lack of space. We'll see about that).

We're also trying something a little different for our herbs this year; growing them in the windowsill didn't work out so well last summer so we've attached a planter to our deck and hopefully that'll increase our herb yield.

Oh, I should also mention that while I was doing all of our gardening stuff on Saturday Darrell was at the driving range trying out his new irons. Not that I'm holding it against him or anything :)

Sunday we spent the day in Mitchell celebrating Easter with my mom's family, and it was another scorcher. I didn't have my camera so I couldn't get a picture of the temps (or any of the festivities) during the day, but I managed to take a screenshot of the temperature before we went to bed.

I couldn't get a timestamp on it so you'll have to take my word on it, but I took that shot at 9:45 last night. And yes, it was still 80* at 9:45. Which was down about thirteen degrees from earlier that day, but still way hot. Darrell and I refuse to turn on our air conditioner in April out of principle, and also because it's supposed to cool down this week, so last night was a hot night. Even with the window open and the "cool" night breeze our house was still 72* when we woke up this morning (which explains why we both woke up not feeling very rested). Hopefully it actually gets into the forties tonight like they're predicting; our house could use the cooling off!