OW! My giant blue head!

It is spring in North Carolina. Full spring, not the short, pitiful and painful little bursts that we are sometimes rewarded with here in the middle. Spring that is past the first super-smelly blooms of the Bradford pears and has moved on to real leaves.

There's a joke that runs around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. It goes like this: "Why is the sky blue?" "Because God's a Carolina fan."

And what I notice more and more is that the sky in North Carolina really is Carolina blue. Seriously. Like this:



The sky doesn't come in that color here. Even when the sun is shining and the sky is cloudless, it doesn't come in that shade.

It is like this:



A watery, washed-out version of blue.

But I did see some forsythia blooming on my way to work today.