Recovery Efforts.

A morning spent writing and the rest of the day spent doing storm cleanup has me in a slightly more optimistic mood about the agricultural concerns. It doesn't hurt that a good half of our lettuces, however banged around, are standing back up, and that there's already new growth on the tomatoes. My fifty-cent geraniums — most of the stock at the local big-box got pulverized, and they were selling it on Sunday for piggy-bank prices — even look like they might come around. I intend to spend the cocktail hour with a tiny pair of scissors pruning back the fiasco on those things. Now: We still certainly look like it hailed as much as it hailed, and some of the yard may not make a comeback until next spring, and the tomatoes are still bruised white all up and down the vines, but there are little signs of hope in odd corners out there.

They've scaled back the storm chances for the week, and the fancies are now just giving us a slight chance each day, which means mainly that it's summer, and it's humid, and nobody knows much of anything about what might happen except that every now and then it kind of looks like it might maybe rain later on, and they're saying basically that. Get the wind blowing the right direction for fifteen minutes in a row and it'll rain at your house. Blow it in the other direction and it could rain here. Could also not rain one drop all week. Keep an umbrella in the car. Wear shorts. We're not quite sure what to tell you here at ANYLF, except that the YLF part of all of this is a bit of a riddle. Let's go with a quick storm sometime tomorrow evening into Wednesday, and not much more than that. All rights, of course, are reserved vis-a-vis changing any portion of that entirely without any notice at all.

Yesterday in the Teeter I noticed a sign above one of the aisles for 'Diet Water.' On the way back down Battleground the Rice Toyota sign said it was -196 degrees. We've still got a few things to sort out in 27408.