While riding my bike yesterday morning on the way to retrieve a car that has been in storage all winter, I was stopped short by a splash of color on a corner lot.

A friendly fellow named Pete was out tending his tulips. He told me in lightly accented English that he was from the Netherlands, and that gardening is something he does as a gift to share with the community, including lucky passers-by like me.

He was examining the beds. Some late-blooming tulips were mixed in with a few of the earlies, which is not a fatal flaw, but it means with a little bit of shuffling bulbs around, things could work better next year. Pete likes everything to be timed properly, just like the producer of a fireworks show wants to create amazing crescendos.

Also, once the petals fall, it’s tough to remember exactly which color is planted where, so it’s smart to take notes and make adjustments.

He showed me his map of the layout. I admire anyone who is a careful planner.

I felt lucky to have the chance to stop for a look at Pete’s garden – now that I’ve got the car back I’m much less likely to happen down a random street. In this case, a random street with an appropriate name – NE Summer St.

The calendar says we’re deep into Spring. Where have you seen the proof?

Some unfortunate Minnesotans had their homes and cars (and heads!) damaged by hail Tuesday evening. Bummer. I hope all repairs and recovery go smoothly.

Most of the weather reports I heard last night kept to the standard American sports scale of measurement – marble sized to golf ball to baseball to softball. That’s assuming you consider marbles a sport.

But I wonder – is that our entire athletico-spherical vocabulary? What about handballs? Raquetballs? I’ve never heard a weather forecaster try to parse relative hardness of hail, though it does vary. If your job is to encourage people to take cover, you would naturally go with the most impressive choice and baseballs and billiard balls are more motivational than tennis balls.

A lacrosse ball is smaller around (7.5 inches) than a baseball (9 inches), could offer a useful distinction, but you never hear meteorologists talk about “lacrosse ball sized hail’. I assume In England and India a handy frame of reference would be “Hail the size of cricket balls.” Try that over here and people would be confused. Cricket balls? Aren’t they very, very tiny?

Not everyone follows sports, so sometimes we use the vegetable scale, starting with pea sized hail and going to … well, that’s about it. I guess we’re just not a vegetable-loving people. Has anyone ever reported brussel sprout sized hail? Hail as large as neatly trimmed radishes? And what about the rest of the grocery store? Hail the size of eggs? Lemons? There’s a report on this page of hail as big as walnuts. Has any spot on Earth ever received Personal Watermelon sized hail, and if so, did anyone live to tell about it?

Not that all hail is perfectly round. In fact, it can be flattened and oblong, but I’m still waiting to hear about a storm that dropped “hail the size of Vienna Fingers” or “cell phone sized hail”.

Then there’s the monetary scale. Dime, penny, nickel, quarter and even half dollar sized hail have been noted, but why stop there? What about “hail as destructive as bundled sub-prime mortgages”? I would run from “Bernie Madoff hail”, and cower at a report that claimed: “hail just swept through Eden Prairie like a mammoth Ponzi scheme, leaving no one untouched.”

What’s the biggest hail you’ve seen? And how would you standardize the measurment?