Last Storm?

Tonight could well be the last thunderstorm for the season, or the last serious storm, or the last something. We've got sixties and forties on the back side of this, and we've got October on the back side of this, too, and even though we do in fact see thundersnow here when occasionally it snows, and even though we had thunderstorms last Thanksgiving, the notion still remains that if our fall somehow looked like actual historical fall, this could have been it. Probably we'll see another one or three. Probably. But still. I'm just saying.

And it was a good one, a pretty one, a lot of cloud-to-cloud and enough cloud-to-ground to get the dog up on the sofa during dinner, smashing herself against AMR in the fervent hope that all would be well, which is the same theory by which I smash my own self against AMR, and it's worked out well enough for the both of us, so. A little more coming our way from the west, and from the sounds of things out east once more the folks Burlington- and Raleigh-ward are getting the worst and best of it, and all I can say is that I love the low rumble of storms off to either side of us, would by and large take that sound over almost any other. A good night to sleep, to sit, to pace the hallway wondering how in hell you'll make your Friday deadline in NYC when the goddamn novel is suddenly due. This is not a malady against which I'm allowed to admit complaint, but still: The next 40ish hours are going to land me on the busy and frantic side of things. Been a long time since I had anything due. Part of me likes the pressure. The other part of me wants to take the dog to the mountains right now and drink coffee and scotch and hike and ignore it all.

Y'all crack your windows out there. Open the blinds and cut the lights off and enjoy the lightning. We'll get this again, surely, but it might not be for a while. Enjoy it while it's here. It's possible we got or will get our half inch. More on that tomorrow. Keep it tuned here, friends and fans of rainfall totals. Keep it tuned here.

Maritime Fog.

Drove Saturday to 21224 and back again yesterday to 27408 and am feeling general malaise lag and rental car lag and all of the other kinds of lag you can get without crossing time zones. Oh, Baltimore. I ain't never really seen it rain like it did up there Saturday afternoon and again Sunday afternoon, which was something more North Atlantic than Mid-Atlantic, but so be it. They're give or take on the ocean, and the remnants of the subtropical storm that was the subtropical storm before this subtropical storm (Laura's got herself a name, friends and fans of subtropical storms) was coming through in ragged pieces such that it would pour for five or ten minutes, and then the sun would break through, and then it would pour again. Very London, if London was ungodly humid, which it never seemed to be when I was there, at least not in that late-September Baltimore way. Oh, Baltimore, Randy Newman sings. Man it's hard/just to live. I was in a grocery store early Sunday morning and those people seemed to have hold of a kind of misery that was maybe specific to grocery stores in the early morning and not to Baltimore, but still: There are places in that city that seem more than a little jagged around the edges.

Our Unnamed Subtropical Storm put down an inch and a quarter here on Friday and Saturday. It also left us with a serious fog coming back in last night, a fog a little like the fog they were having further north, such that I ended up feeling like there might be a general fog in the wake of the UST, that it had dropped a kind of remnant of summer down in our fall, and there wasn't much of anywhere for it to go except up towards the sodium lamps and the low branches here and everywhere else. I do love a good fog. I'm fairly sure I'm in one.

Sunny and warm this morning and that lower and lower light as we aim out of the equinox and toward the other solstice. Dog shedding like she never has before. Don't know what kind of harbinger that is. I got to wear one of my stupid skullcaps last Friday. If all goes well and the oceans don't rise, I'll get to wear one again this week. Come on, weather of hats and coats.

September's been spotty, friends and fans of weather. I'll do better in October. We're half an inch short on rainfall. I blame myself. I got busy. Took the weather for granted. Started to act like it would come every day whether I mentioned it or not. So: We've got a little tiny outside shot at a storm tomorrow. Maybe we'll get that half-inch. Go out on a bright shiny note. Cool weather in and on the forecast for the late week. Genuinely cool. Truck-to-school cool. We shall see. We shall see. We shall see.

Subtropical Storm.

It appears as though our storm has pulled on west beneath us, oddly, and is spinning right along the state line between NC and SC near, I guess, Gastonia. Good hard rain most of the day today. An inch or so. Lots of wind. We may get the back half of it up out of the south later on, so maybe don't start up any major outdoor projects. If you need to walk the dog, though, do that. Now's the time.

We're dry inside and out. More and more that Fay rain is looking like a hundred-year flood. Or at least a five-year flood.

Raining again. I'm not at all sure our radar today has had much to do with when it's actually raining. The radar has us in the sure clear right now, but I've looked out the window, and I'm pretty sure that's rain. Yeah. That's rain. Official ANYLF Unnamed Subtropical Storm forecast: It's going to rain some more. At times. On occasion. Like now.

Nasty Storm.

The weather's turned gloriously, deliriously nasty, and it would be so, so fine with me, except for the wee shed and roof situations, but what I'm trying to do is buckle in and enjoy it all regardless. We're not forecast to get anything like the amount of rain we got with Fay, and we handled Hannah OK post-Fay and post-roof tarp, so let's just us all say how dry the renovated shed is going stay all night, how dry our dining room ceiling will be when we wake up tomorrow morning.

Comes at the end of this entry, courtesy of JBW and the good folks at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), a wee video of our nameless subtropical cyclone, which seems by all accounts to be coming right for us. That coastline you can see there is the SC/NC coastline. That direction you can see it headed in there is usward.

Should be a windy, raw night, friends and fans of weather. Should be a good one. Maybe it's nice to be nervous about the weather. Maybe it's healthy. We're under a wind advisory until 9 p.m. We'll probably get a shiny new one after that. They're not quite warning about flooding just yet, but it feels like they want to. So: Pull on a hat. Find you something to sip on. Crack the door open. Check the shed 10,000 times. Don't have a shed? Come on over here to the ANYLF Unnamed Subtropical Cyclone Southeastern Regional Field Office and check mine.

Dog Weather.

This is the dog weather. Good wind and the temps falling off. There's some kind of half-hurricane down east that's trying to give us rain through the weekend. The bathroom out back comes along: trim on the door today. The novel comes along: I'm working against/toward an early October deadline. Randy Newman on the stereo. Crickets and wind through the window. Dog trying to decide whether or not to eat. Flannel and jeans. Knit cap on the dogwalk—that was out of season, but a kid can hope. Wind again. Pretty little sunset back home out of 27244 around 7:30. The days are shortening right up. Fall. It's almost fall.

The dog spent the morning out back biting the wind.

Gray Morning.

This was not the forecast, but we know by now that the fancies are as often as not sticking their hands down in the big bag of weather icons and slapping up on the board whatever they pick out first. A big blue H and a sun with a little fluffy cloud down where its skirt ought to go? Super. We've probably still got the big blue H somewhere nearby — don't get me wrong — but I'm guessing it's a little less nearby than the big board had it last night, and I'm guessing this is some kind of low-level low-energy something that slid in underneath our big blue H, and even though it looks like it's already starting to burn off some, it's lovely in its own way, and I say pour another cup of coffee and tug on an old shirt and sit on the porch and enjoy it. The dog will have none of that, of course: She's gone back to bed.

Comes next the glinty sun and the seventy-four degrees and the fall breeze and the windows-down drive to 27244, and even though the drive to 27244 means going to 27244, perhaps the windows down will mitigate some of that, and I can summon something up from within me to cancel out all the whiny complaining about my job I've been subjecting the inside of my head and the inside of my house to for the better part of two weeks. I am not loving the job part of my job right now. I am loving the coming-home-from-my-job part of my job right now. I have had to say one too many times this term that the breakup endured when you were fifteen, Meghan, is probably not a suitable subject for your art. And not to be pissy about it, but it's probably not even a suitable subject for the deadly serious late-evening convos over at the Phi Whatever house right upon the conclusion of an All New Very Special Gossip Girls. Oh, and Brian? No, I don't think you should revise that poem about Brett Favre.

This of course will be the weather report that one of my darlings over at J. Crew U accidentally stumbles on while googling "dog poetry weather flannel whiskey Meghan," so let me go ahead with this blanket and actually true disclaimer: I love the job anyway, even when I have to fight fights I don't want to fight. But something about real and true fall settling in makes me want to do a little less of the job — teach a little less and write a little more, walk the dog more, drink coffee more, explain one or two fewer times about why the phrase "pure as snow" isn't really acceptable under any circumstances, not even weather-related ones. I don't know what my problem is. I've got the big head, somehow think I've earned my way away from misery. I know I'll be explaining why you can't say "In the growing dark, we made decisions" until the day I die. I know that this sort of misery is not really chain gang misery, and that folks out there suffering real and true and actual misery mightn't even have the patience for this little lament. So I apologize. Maybe it's this gray morning. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm going to work now. Mark the novel. Another cup of coffee. Then it's in to 27244, in to my other job. I'll make it. Don't worry about me. Attend to your own miseries out there. When the oxygen mask descends, friends and fans of weather, make sure your own mask is secure first, and then assist the person in the seat next to you.

New York.

"The kid in the city, big ears like a puppy" is how Bill Matthews has it, and that was me, standing in the blazing sun, squinting up the street, hailing a cab, riding twenty blocks south and wondering how in the hell I'd ended up there and then doing that. Temps in the mid-seventies, little breeze. Textbook fall. Look it up, and there it is. Not one quiet moment in forty-eight hours, not one time when you couldn't hear brakes and trains and horns and sirens and disagreement in the languages of your choice. NYC seems right on the edge of filthy, such that when the little breeze does come, if it brings a kind of fresh air, you notice. Still: In all that stench and noise and busy there's something to be much loved, the feeling that Something Is Going On Here, the kind of feeling I used to get crossing the campus at UGA, passing the library, say, or the science buildings, getting hold of the notion that Things Were Happening, and that's for sure what I felt on my Friday cab ride, looking up and out the window at building after building after building, each one holding somebody working her way towards something else, towards what's next, or what might be. Buzz at the right door and they just might let you in, just might say Hello, just might say It's good to meet you, just might, just might, just might.

We dragged that weather back with us, minus the noise and the smells, and so with not much further ado let us here at ANYLF Global Fall Headquarters welcome you to a new season. In 20 minutes, at 11:44 a.m. EDT, the sun slinks by its predetermined point and we shall all of us here squint out at the autumnal equinox. There may be a few tomatoes left out there on the vine, and the determined among you may be able to coax another crop of greens along, but we move now toward harvest, toward storing up for the winter, toward the longer nights and shorter days. Now is a time for projects. Make your lists, friends and fans of weather. Get up just a little earlier. Do the work that needs to be done.

It's fall. It's possible this whole project has been aiming itself towards this.

Weather Update.

Go outside. Go outside right now. Do not come in for a long time. Do you hear me?

Turned Cool.

First flannel shirt of the season yesterday. Cooler tonight than last night. I'm not sure it smells like fall, but it smells like it smells like fall. And in other news, the new bathroom is all but in outside, and nothing's leaking any more. The sink leaked for a day and a half, but that's because PVC and metal don't so much go together, and also because I twisted the thing the directions said to not twist. The toilet's not leaking because I have lived a very nearly just life and am being rewarded for it—that, or basic principles of hydrodynamics are for whatever reason on my side this week. I don't know. All I know is that we had a post-Fay bathroom outside on Friday, and now we have a post-post-Fay bathroom outside.

More than one plumbing dude at Lowe's knows me by sight. Hey, I say. Can I ask you a question?

We head to NYC this weekend for some insanity literary and otherwise. The forecast high for Friday in the Big Apple is 65. With sun. That, friends and fans of stupid winter skullcaps, may be stupid winter skullcap weather, at least by cocktail hour. I don't have the kind of life where I can up and jet to NYC, but that's what I'm up to: it's a kind of fairyland craziness, and for now, I'll take it. If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. It's up to you, 10003, 10003.

Crickets at it hard here in 27408. Dogs barking off in the distance, but not across the street. Plumbing functioning as it should. Jeans and boots weather. Dog happy. Dishes washed and kitchen ready for morning coffee. Getting dark earlier and earlier. I'm ready, goddamnit. Maybe not for sleet, maybe not yet, but I'm ready.

Dog Storm.

Whatever this is, we're getting pretty good rain out of it. At about 6:45, just before it started rumbling, the dog hopped up on the bed seeking solice, and I thanked our resident barometer and ran outside to roll the windows up on the truck. By the time I got back in bed it was raining, and it has been since. What thunder we did get was that kind of low, peeled-apart-sounding thunder, cloud-to-cloud, slow, sleepy. So far at least a half a inch. So far the shed and its spanking new half-finished bathroom remains dry. So long as I've been up the temperature's been holding right around sixty degrees. It's enough to make a person want for some blue jeans.

I know there are people who don't care much for this kind of thing, who know now they're looking at a morning of jogging across parking lots and walking soggily through chilly grocery stores and post offices. This is the weather where if you want a funk to come down on you, you can sure as hell engineer that. This is one of those harbingers of colder things to come, of summer headed out and fall waiting there in the corner, a lurker at the party. This is the canary in the coal mine. I've always wondered if they named those guys. My grandmother had a parakeet when I was a kid. Name: Birdy. But that is not the point. The point is no, people, no. Don't sulk. Have more coffee instead. Have more coffee and wear one of your long-sleeved t-shirts from the Boulevard Bolt. You love those things. It's been too warm to wear them. It's been months since you pulled on one. Get one of the ones you cut the cuffs off of. Hunker down. Crack a window. Cut a light on. Read something. It's Tuesday. Something's coming through. It's raining.

Hot, Windy.

Something's coming, but man, it's warm out there, even now, even late. The bathroom reno rolls on. Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes: In June, when I swore off wet rooms for life. It's my friend JBW who warns against the wet rooms, goes face-dark at any mention of plumbing, of water damage. A half-teardown of the outside bathroom: Shower stayed put, but everything else came out. There were some anxious moments trying to figure how to raise the toilet flange -- called, quaintly, a closet flange in the biz -- to the level of the new floor, but that problem's all but solved, and we may again have indoor plumbing outside by tomorrow night.

Mid-September means today's ninety degrees could well be our last ninety degrees until next May or June or, if the last few winters tell us anything, March. We keep picking up these ninety degree March days, getting all the daffodils scorched, pushing the fruit trees to bloom just in time for the corollary March freeze. We can fret that out in six months, though. For now, let's look at the seventies and fifties forecast for the end of the week. Hat weather coming. Even in the ninety degrees, you could sniff that out.

Each picture out of Texas looks worse than the last. The one that's sticking with me tonight is the one of the man in Galveston standing on his porch, flood halfway up his steps -- he's got his hands on his head and he's watching the house next to him burn. Watching a fire in a flood would bust my head wide open. Galveston's half rubble. Houston's got glass in the streets. The pictures out of Crystal Coast suggest that there is no Crystal Coast. Nobody can get to anybody to help with much of anything. Does every coastal town figure it'll get wiped clean every hundred years or so?

It's too hot. We've got wind. Here, that means we're toggling between seasons. Here, we're lucky that's what it means.

Missed Days.

Weather update, live from 27408: two cool gray days gave over to something like a warm sponge yesterday, and today we've got what looks like summer back and set in and sunny and hot. Down in Texas they've got the ocean in their living rooms. Here we're tearing out the shed bathroom, the last work left from Fay. New floor, new everything. Yesterday we got the PTA newsletter, intended for Blue-Tick Beagle Paul across the street. Today we prime and paint the new floor.

My apologies, weatherheads. I missed two good chances to tell you how gray it was. Now all I can tell you is how much I miss the gray, how ready I am for the sort of weather we've got cooked up today to be something I miss, too. Back outside to do what I can do to make the floor work like a floor, the toilet work like it's meant to, too.

New Belt.

I bought a new belt today. First belt I can remember buying. My other belts were from high school. Turns out: belts matter. They keep these newfangled Gap jeans on my body. Bought me some Gap jeans off the interwebs. AMR had some kind of sale card thing. This was a while back. My other Gap jeans, which I bought a whole other while back, when we stopped at an outlet mall on the way back from the beach two years ago looking for overalls for my mom, didn't much stay on, either. Probably gonna try out my new belt on those things, too. Hey, new belt. All y'all out there should get yourselves belts. Yeah, belts.

It rained most of the time I was shopping for my new belt and most of the time that followed that time, but not much overall: a tenth of an inch here. More than that out in 27244, where it rained more earnestly. Gray and cool. Like maybe long-sleeves cool. We'll be hot again, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about chili walking through the breezeway between Whitley and Alamance today. Whitley and Alamance sound like a turn-of-the-last-century comedy team. British. Ladies and germs, please give a rousing welcome to Whitley & Alamance.

Me, I've got time and energy to spare, enough to make jokes about belts and buildings. Good luck to those of you in Texas who have no such luxury, who need plywood and, well, luck. Ike looks bad at this point. They've been half-wrong all year, so maybe they'll be half-wrong again, and maybe that thing will settle down, but it's over warm water, and that can't be great.

Gray and cool and drizzly here tomorrow. Heat building back in this weekend, but cooler, crisper days may be in the offing after that. It's surely time for that kind of thing. We'll see.

My new belt's so new that when I move the leather creaks.

Tomato Sauce.

Two batches. Two skillets. The first working Monday of 08-09. The sauce is right now cooling on the stove. Salmon for supper. Okra, too. Warm outside. We're out of dog food, and the dog won the lottery: leftover rotisserie chicken and brown rice for her dinner. Art Blakey on the stereo. Rain in the forecast. That part of the shed known to have standing water in it is now dry. The last novel revision before the next one starts tomorrow. A nightcap now while the sauce cools enough to go into the freezer. The crickets and cicadas go on apace. Art Blakey. Cocktails and appetizers with AMR in the library out in front of dinner. On a Monday. Who'd have thunk it?

Sunday Chores.

Fifteen dollars out 40 at the Farmers Market for nearly a full banker's box of Cherokee Purples and well more than half a box of Mountain Prides ought to make for so much tomato sauce that we'll have to give it away. Add that on to a solid pot of coffee, a visit to an open house where the house had already been sold, a backyard cleanup, and the removal of every other floorboard in the entryway of the rancid shed — and the discovery, finally, of the standing water that we hope is making the rancid shed rancid — and let's us call this a full and thorough Sunday.

We're still hot here, and the tropics are still roiling south, but the 10-day is starting to perhaps maybe show hints of fall. It's surely not time for the yearly ordering of winter watchcaps, but that time's edging nearer. What do you want out of an early fall? Final revisions of a first book. Fits and starts of a second. Hints of the kind of weather that would make you think about jeans, about wearing socks. The kind of light we got one more time today as the afternoon cooked off into evening.

Do you want highs and lows? The official ANYLF guess lands us mid-80s and mid-60s, and though the outside afternoon ablutions ended up hot as hell, it still feels like we're on the waning side of summer, the waxing side of what comes next. Maintenance may be the way to go in the coming months: priming and painting anything that moves, scouring gutters, reclaiming the landscaping, sweeping, scraping, brush removal, and the replacing of those removed floorboards. Tarp's still on the roof. Other storms are coming, but Fay's still here. We've got all manner of things to do. Somebody ought to make a list. Somebody get me a pen.

Tarp Nails.

Well, WeatherDog, we came through all right. We only got about an inch, so I'm not sure what kind of test that is, but the creeks didn't rise and the tarp held on. Only about an inch. Not sure that phrase has ever appeared here at ANYLF. And now it's September-yellow out there, the sun breaking through more often than not, and the light's the kind of way where you want to open up the front door and discover it isn't even seventy degrees out there, except that it's well more than that, a kind of muggy warmth, and we continue to ride right along the line between seasons.

Spent the morning reading TLK's so often lovely poems and I'm still in my robe at 1:43 in the p.m. and I'm battle-weary from having gotten up to check the ceiling at 4:30 and again at 7:45, but I've had some coffee and some breakfast and TLK and I have big plans to spend the afternoon at a local fried-food-and-cheap-beer purveyor watching the Georgias play the Central Michigans on the satellite, and then tonight I get to make some avocados and tomatoes into something good to eat, and so even though I've sent several J.Crew U-related emails today, thus violating in most ways my work-life balance, there's not that much against which to lodge complaint.

The cicadas are cranking up out there. They don't know what time of the day or year it is, either.

Sentimental Value.

Yeah. About that whole Hannah sliding by thing: This morning the track had shifted back west, and this noon it shifted a little more west, and now the fancies are saying, Yes, it's going to rain, and Oh, we don't know, maybe an inch or two, or maybe five. I've been on the phone with the good folks at Insure-You-Lots and they said OK, go ahead and nail the tarp down on your roof. So I feel (a) safe and sound and pretty sure that the tarp won't blow off, but (b) a little nervous re: the holes that I made in the roof nailing it down. The nails have these little semi-confidence-inspiring rubber washers on them. That'll be me up at three in the morning, then, checking to see if we still have a ceiling. It's an odd, odd day here at the ANYLF TropicsWatch WeatherDesk. I mean, we do love a good hurricane, but we also like knowing things for sure about the roof.

Bonus coverage: Ike'll probably be here next week, so I've got two good chances to get this wrong.

It's a pretty little rain out there in 27244, and I hope the same back home. Good for flowers, and for the okra I'm completely ignoring. Good for the colony of seven trillion black ants I found in the shed gutter this morning. Hopefully they've moved into the shed by now, where it smells like there still must be water. Fay is the gift that keeps on mouldering.

You know what, friends and fans of weather? You should all go up onto your roofs and drive a few nails in. It's fun, it's educational, and it's good for folks with paralytic fears of heights and slopes. The adjuster dude circled everywhere we had hail damage. It's a wonder he had any chalk left. We're right circly up there. I'm just hoping we're all buttoned up and mainly watertight, too. Tune in to this same spot tomorrow, then, when we might just hear ANYLF say: Gee, WeatherDog, it looks like we came through just fine. Or we'll hear him saying something else, in which case maybe don't let the kiddies near the screen. Viewer discretion is, I reckon, advised.

Finally, in other news, there's a sign at the end of a driveway right here by J. Crew U that reads PLEASE RETURN PLANT. Underneath that, it says, SENTIMENTAL VALUE. That's not the weather, I know, but it seemed like part of the forecast.

Right Hot.

Fall's coming, I guess, but we're getting one last terrific example of summer. Hasn't rained in a week. Hot as hell. I'm all but sure the shed leaks now, and even so, I'm ready for rain. The drive to 27244 is back as a regular part of my day, and so too are the dead geese, dogs, cats, raccoons, possums, hawks and crows, all run over, all rotting and cooking and bloating off into ruin. What an odd drive 70 can be. No odder than a room full of twenty kids wanting something, but odd all the same.

Hannah looks like she may slide by. Ike's something else altogether. Y'all keep an eye to the Floridian Atlantic coast. That thing's headed there, and then it may eventually be headed here. The weather's coming. One way or the other, I think we can be sure of that.

Shorter Nights.

The light's gotten all long and thick in the evenings. Surely you've noticed, friends and fans of the coming autumnal equinox. Fall's looming, even as the tropics threaten to submerge your writing shed and mine. It's hot. It's humid. Still, on the drive home from 27244, there was a yellowness, a liquidness, to the failing evening, and I had that sure feeling of flannel and hats and dogwalks and boots. Hell yes, jeans and shirts. The tomatoes are already slowing. I'm ready. Hell yes, scotch and roasted pork.

I drove the truck around town tonight, windows down and dog riding sidesaddle. We were hot. It's August hot in September. We're the both of us ready for our fur to be useful. We're panting. We're ready for those 79-degree highs and 49-degree lows. I'm ready to see my breath. I'm ready for the dog to be ready.

Today was a day of thinking about novels and thinking about teaching writing to 19-year-olds. Today, finally, on balance, was a good day. Came home and the damned beagles were barking across the street. But then they stopped. I had a cocktail and cooked potatoes. Don't know that I could ask for much more than that. Don't know that I should.

More Storms.

Many more: Hannah, Ike and Josephine. Sounds like a 60's protest band. Hannah wants to protest by dropping, so the fancies think right now anyway, five more inches of rain on us after hitting, perhaps, Jacksonville, Savannah, and maybe Myrtle. Ike might be headed for the Gulf via Cuba and Miami, and Josephine could go just about anywhere. Gustav's in Arkansas, or nearly so, and may eventually slide some moisture our way. For those of you keeping score, the roof still leaks and the shed's still a rank mystery. Should be a fun weekend. I'm thinking a lot about flashing right now. Oh, the clear and obvious fallacy that is climate change. And, for that matter, slab foundations.

I wore my back-to-school outfit today.

A question from one of my 2:20-4:00ers: So, um, what should we write our poem about?
Me: I have no idea, but it better be good.

Then I told them that what was most likely the truth was that I had no real ability or promise in terms of teaching them how to write. Maybe I can show them what to read, I said, and maybe I can show them how to read it. Maybe I can show them how not to write. Maybe I can just have them all come over and dig in a huge French drain around the shed. Whatever the truth is, I see them again on Thursday, and need to think up something new to tell them by then.

Hot and sunny here, friends and fans of weather, but not, I don't think, for long.