Out, Lamb.

Clouding over. Rain on the way. Warm, or warmish. Strange odd midspring. First azaleas about to bloom. Then we'll know for sure.

Light Seen.

First things first: it's chilly out, and partly to mostly cloudy. Should warm into the afternoon such that sitting out in the yard, whether at your home or at your work, might not be the worst idea you ever had.

Second things second, though: After a day warmer than we'd been told it would be, a better day than we could have wished for, a little slashing something whipped through at about 6 last night and spit on us for a while—the driveway didn't even get fully wet. You could still see dry driveway between the raindrops. But that's not what I'm telling you about. What I'm telling you about is what came next: At around seven, or a little later, the edge of that thing cleared east just far enough to let the sun set off the back side of it, and what resulted was this liquid golden light that even a nonbeliever like me would have to call sanctified, and you don't have to take my word for it: Up and down Walker Ave—I was piloting the ANYLFMobile down Walker Ave—people were coming out of their houses and places of business and leisure to photograph the light. A young woman came out of the Blind Tiger and took one shot facing east, into the golden sanctified light, and one shot facing west, into the blinding setting sun. Persons came out of their homes and stood on the sidewalks and took pictures on cell phones and actual cameras.

The light was like this: It made the leafless trees, whose bark is gray and brown by any other measure, turn gold. There are not really any other words besides gold for what this was. Golden and sanctified. And I have to say that I think not having leaves yet did something to the quality and the caliber of this light, kept it from being green, maybe, kept it gold. This was the kind of light where you'd want to contact your friends and neighbors and say, Hey, did you see the light? This was the kind of light where, later last night, after I returned thirty dollars lighter from my Walker Ave poker game, AMR, who does not always notice things such as the outside world, said, Did you see the light?

We'll use 'sanctified,' by the way, in a non-exclusive non-specifically-religious way. We'll use it in a Jesus-waving-flags-and-menorahs kind of way. A meteorological way, then.

Morning, Sunshine.

We did not get the storms they promised, but we did get a band of thunderless showers through here in the wee hours, bringing our storm total to more than an inch and a half, and taking us over six inches for the month. The smart money says we'll be delisted from the droughtometer when this week's numbers get released.

It is give or take 65 degrees and sunny and windy here on the WeatherPorch, and there's a warmth in the wind, and so if you were looking for a day you could call perfect, this would be damn near it, at least so far. I've got this feeling we'll cool off a bit through the afternoon, though, on our way into the low forties/upper thirties tonight. You don't get days like this for free.

The finches came through fine.

Little of any of that matters, though, friends and fans of the entirely astonishing, as much as the following furtively-taken by-me this-morning photograph of a house around the corner from ANYLF Global WeatherWatch HQ:


Dear sweet grown-up patriotic open-minded Jesus in the front yard, do I love this.

Small Preparations.

A confession: I really thought we'd wake up to a kind of mottled sunshine this morning, a respite from all this gray out in front of what the fancies are promising may be some toothy midnight storms. Instead, March continues apace, the sky back behind the white church steeple itself almost white. It was grayer earlier, when, I kid you not, The Human Race raced by 709, directly down the middle of our street. The Human Race had rainsuited paramedics on bicycles. The Human Race had tall skinny men spitting into the curbs. The Human Race had persons holding their sides in half-agony. Much later on, The Human Race had small children. The Human Race had tweens. Eventually, The Human Race had plump persons ambling past with soda bottles in their hands. Those humans were not so much racing as doing the bare minimum possible to earn their The Human Race long-sleeved t-shirts.

We're warm enough for storms. What's building down south, down in and around Georgia, looks pretty fierce. Already here at ANYLF we are considering ways we might better secure the ferns to their front porch hooks, so as to better secure the procreating finches held therein. One does not want storm-evicted finches. As far as your signs and omens go, that cannot be a great one. So: Maybe a bit of string or twine later on. I have to upset them anyway—the ferns need water. Might as well do what I can to tie them down at the same time. And this is what it comes to, friends and fans of the long suburban wash: We spend our afternoons knotting our songbirds more tightly to their perches. And better yet: We spend our mornings planning to.

Rain Redux.

Here's how it rains in 27401 these days: Rarely, but all at once. Or maybe this is how it rains everywhere, and how it always has. But these days of set-in rain feel unfamiliar somehow, feel out of place. What I remember of March: It finds ways to hold spring off one more day, one more week. Last year, a late hard cold snap. This year, these rains. We're warming, though: Today's rain is up from the south. Yesterday's was out of the west.

We're over five inches for the month, well and well past what we were owed. No sense complaining. Come August we'll have needed every bit of this. And more coming: Storms Saturday night into Sunday morning. Getting to be time, friends and fans of thunder and lightning, to start recalibrating— there's a whole new sky over here at 709. I knew where to look and how to listen over there at 1303. Don't really know much of anything over here, yet, except where the cardinal directions lie.

Heavy Fog.

Let's say it's 400 yards to the church steeple from where I'm sitting here at the kitchen table. Maybe it's only 300 yards. I'm not sure. There's another house, a street, and a gym between here and there. I've never been inside the gym, but it's pretty clear what kind it is: bleachers that roll out or accordion back into themselves along the walls, hoops that crank down from the ceiling. Metal supports for the roof just low enough to interfere with/make compelling a game of paddleball. Paddleball: a small canoe paddle sawed off and taped at the sawed-off handle, flat rubber bases about where baseball bases should go. Tennis ball. House rules, a la, if the ball hits the ceiling supports, it's either a ground-rule double or a live ball, depending. But I digress.

Low forties. Rain and drizzle all night. Fog so heavy still, at eleven o'clock in the morning, that I cannot quite make out the entirety of the steeple. New ways to think about the word muffled, too, when the clock in that thing chimes the hour. They say warmer weather tomorrow. A day like today makes it hard to believe it will ever be anything other than the way it is right now.

Noontime Oatmeal.

Because that's the sort of day we've drawn: Low, low clouds, temps in the forties, big rain coming. Two inches over the next five days, which will take us toward seven for the month. Added mandatory Greensboro caveat, from having been left short so many times: Or so they say. But that radar looks like even an armchair meteorologist could point at all the Doppler mess and say, Ah, Mabel? Probably best if one of us goes out and rolls up the windows on the Buick.

Dogwoods holding, holding, waiting for a run of sunny days in the sixties and seventies. Tulips holding, too, and the Japanese magnolias, and the damn near everything else. This has so far been a slow smolder of a spring, hints and fits and starts and a day or two where you think, I better stock the fridge with some cheap beer, and then a run of other days where you figure maybe it might be best not to get out of bed at all.

Head a mess this morning, sparked full of ideas and inertia all at the same time. Turned the heat on out back there in the writing shed. Now I'm just waiting for it to warm over out there. So to speak. Or so they say.

Warmer weather by the weekend. Chance of rain all the way through. Keep your boots by the door. Maybe keep one pair by the front door, another by the back. Best to be prepared.

Half-Ton.

The official ANYLF pickup: half-ton. Tonnage of compost brought back this noon from the TLK High Point Soil Extravaganza: .9 tons. For those of you scoring at home, that's .4 tons more than the truck is meant to carry. Or, ah, 800 pounds. Like ye olde gorilla. Driving home was like driving on ice: Put a ton of weight on a half-ton rear-wheel drive situation, particularly a situation where your front wheels are your steering wheels, and you'll find that the steering is no longer the first thing that comes to the situation's mind.

We warmed this afternoon to a true windows-down temperature. We cool right back off again the rest of the week, and we cloud over, too, just to keep in check those of us who thought winter might have come and gone, those of us who all afternoon planted daylilies and whatnot, those of us who've, oh, I don't know, overtonned our pickups of late, those of us who got all excited and brought home all that gorgeous black dirt.

Chilly weather coming. Rain and storms. One more chance—if not the last—to wear the winter hats. And it's good: there's inside work to be done. One needs to sit at the desk a while, and not just dig holes in the ground. One needs coffee and cold rain and revision. One needs to know clear and well what sort of asswipe that makes one sound like. Still: One will drink some coffee in the cold rain, OK? And one will not say one's sorry about it. Hey, pronouns.

Last late local conditions: Still warm. Train. Steeple visible from everywhere: The trees haven't leafed out yet. Which is exactly where we are: The trees have not yet leafed out.

Orange Soda.

Eight azaleas, twelve daylilies, six iris, two hydrangeas and a peony leave our hero a little light in the bank account, but those prizes plus a trip to the prison farm for too-early-to-plant oregano and tender rosemary (to be distinguished, I think, from woody-stemmed) plus—oh, friends and fans of small Carolina towns—a pair of midday VFW hot dogs, slaw and mustard, please, made for the kind of Saturday that conjured memories of being six years old, or eight, or ten, and one's father stopping slyly into, say, the VFW hot dog situation, telling you, now his accomplice, Now don't tell your mom we did this. And then, at the cooler, after he's let you choose a Sunkist: Now don't tell her I said that was OK.

I hadn't had a Sunkist in probably ten years, or twenty. Won't have one for another however long. Dear sweet baby Jesus at the soda shop those things are sweet. Still: a nearly fine choice to wash down them VFW hot dogs.

The (relatively) low humidity plus the ground greening in out there has the morning light looking like glass. Sky a kind of washed-out blue. Leafless trees looking like they won't be that way long. Mid-forties here in the nine-o'clock hour, but even the heat on the breeze, to say nothing of the sun, says we'll achieve the sixties the fancies have been promising. Today's a day for turning soil over, for seeing what we've got there in the front yard, for seeing what we'll need to add. A little light to moderate mattocking. A chance to sully a perfectly good pair of jeans. Break in the resoled boots. Let's us all work hard enough to deserve that late-day beer, that self-satisfied squint into the cooling, falling evening sun.

Assorted Happinesses.

House wrens still house wrenning.

Boots back from real-live cobbler. New soles. Good for 10,000 miles, said the cobbler. New laces thrown in for free.

Walked home last night under a big umbrella in a light rain. There was a reading at the G. Lovely side effect of 27401: walking, not driving, to things like readings, light rain or no.

New glasses. The old ones couldn't see. These ones can.

This late evening sunshine. The dog in it.

The possibility of coming through this recent half-arctic high without a widespread killing frost, even though we'd have to have more things up and killable to count any frost as a killing frost, widespread or otherwise.

Looming Saturday errands: shrub nursery, prison farm.

Looming Sunday project: lawnmowing.

Spring break. What a deeply civilized idea. Mine started just now. And while we're at it, let's posit that weather like today's is the real spring—days in the seventies you don't have to work for, and all one wants in the world is a pitcher of margaritas, a low-slung chair. Days like today—warmth in the sun but long-sleeved all the same, daffodils trying for one or two more good days, dogs barking quietly enough off down the hill, cherry trees starting in, tulips up out of the ground in places, yards greening over, places for daylilies starting to suggest themselves, the truck beginning to look like it could for sure and certain use a half-ton of compost in the bed—days like today are a good kind of spring.

Damn Near.

It's going to be cold—chilly, rather—tomorrow and Saturday. We may get a fern-killing frost overnight one or both nights. We may not. It's close. They keep moving that Friday night low back and forth. Doesn't matter. Look at the dogwoods. Yours, mine. We're close. We are right about there.


Just now—we're riding the porch again this morning, of course, the dog and I—an extraordinarily old man came by with an extraordinarily young dog. Long, long leash. At each block, the dog would get to the curb, and then he'd just stand there, turn around and look over his shoulder, and wait for the man to teeter up behind him. Mad's still staring after the two of them like she can't believe any part of it.

Wee Beasties.

OK. The dog and I are the both of us doing what we can to acclimate our house finches to our porchliness. Most of the nesting situation took place during the 40 degrees and raining, and I grant you, hardier souls would have porched it then, too, but somehow, this past weekend, we weren't those souls. This morning, in the sun and sixties, though, we are. Quite. How it goes with the finches: she sits on the nest and screams until he comes back with the food. This is a remnant of mating behavior, apparently, as discussed here. Additional fascinating house finch tidbits are available for your knowledged pleasure here and here. Our house finches, as are yours, apparently, and everybody else's, are here by way of Mexico via New York.

In Non-Breaking News News, via CNN this morning was this so so marvelous story about the DETOUR project in Philadelphia -- DETOUR stands for Detour for Emerging Toads of Upper Roxborough. While this violates a longstanding ANYLF feeling about acronyms -- namely, that the acronym should not have in it the word that itself is becoming the acronym -- because of what this is, which is, as near as we here at ANYLF can tell, a project wherein roads will be closed for toads, we will allow it. And make small happy noises about it. More wee beasty info here, here and here. From one of the aforelinked articles:

The migration is a mating ritual during which the toads leave the woods around the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education and head for the Roxborough Reservoir to find a toad of the opposite sex.

Rainy weather and a series of warm days are their siren song to burrow out from the loose soil where they have spent the winter in dormancy and kick up their heels.

Volunteer toad-spotters are prowling the roads at twilight to alert the toads' protectors to put up city-approved temporary detour signs.

Toads and house finches, people. And coffee and the dog. May we all close our roads when the weather's just right, no?

Morning Coffee.

It was gray when we started things off today -- rained late last night, and then fog and whatever else hung on much of the day -- but by 3ish this afternoon we were sunny, or partly sunny, and even if it was cooler than the greened-over grass out at 27244 made it look like, it was still surely spring, and the promise of coffee on the porch is out there: we need to break in the fern-housed house finches to our presence, anyway, and so the dog and I have big plans to do not much else other than sit out front tomorrow morning and drink coffee and bark at whoever comes by.

Dry Patches.

Things that are dry, or drying: the front porch steps, certain patches in the street. Not dry: the basement, which had a couple inches of standing water when I went down to encourage the sump pump, which works fine, unless no one is there to shake it, which was why I went down there, etc.

Better than two inches in that storm since Friday, and more to come tomorrow. Fancier weatherheads than I might have you believe this was more than one storm, or several bursts of energy from, oh, I don't know, a familial series of storms, but I say that if we haven't seen the sun since whenever, and if it's been essentially raining since whenever, then we'll call that all one storm. Exceptions: Northwesterners. But we are not Portland or Bellingham or any of those fancier, pale-aleier towns. We are Greensboro, in the sometime dry shadow of the lower Appalachians, and we have, as a result of this persistent storm and the one that rung the month in, exceeded our historical monthly average for rainfall, and we are not even halfway through with the thing. The month, that is. And, easily excitable friends and fans of historical averages, keep please ye in mind that the numbers now in official use by the crackerjack ANYLF Almanac Staff are larger numbers, by and large, than last year's numbers, since we've dispensed with the 'Wedding Planning' page of The Weather Channel's online festival of info, and have instead hitched our wagons to the State Climate Office of North Carolina and its affiliated rain gaugery.

In Looking Forward To The Coming Week News, remember, of course, that the National Drought Monitor releases updates every Thursday morning, and while it may be wishful thinking to say that a little storm like this one might pull us back down out of that first category, D0/Abnormally dry, I don't mind: I'll be out of bed early and often awaiting them there numbers. What I can tell you about the back yard here at ANYLF Regional Drought Monitoring HQ: not currently in drought. Currently, rather, in swamp.

The finches in our ferns continue their work. Crocus and daffodil and the first hint of color from iris in the easterly neighbor's yard. Forsythia in the westerly neighbor's yard. Not much here, but then we haven't had much of a chance. All this hanging right around freezing but not quite going below has got me dreaming of flats of impatiens, though, of gladiolas, of shrubs and trees. It's been cold, weatherers. Cold and wet and generally miserable. Except it felt like spring the whole, whole time, didn't it?

Fog and rain the next day or two. Sun and sixties by midweek. One imagines every damn living thing in town will bloom after that.

Be Prepared.

I don't care if it's 39, and I don't care if there was ice on the WeatherDeck this morning—it smells like spring out there, like soil and ozone and I'm not sure what all else, but two weeks ago when it rained and snowed it smelled altogether differently than it does out there now. It smells almost like a thunderstorm. Like a very slow, very chilly thunderstorm. It smells like wet street. Grass. Pine bark. Sidewalk. Dirt.

Don't look for the sun any time soon, say the fancies. If you've got paper boats, bundle up and take 'em down to the creeks and streams, which ought to be edging up over the next few days. We might see the moon on Monday night. It might be sixty on Tuesday. Between now and then, probably better than an inch of rain. Good chance to pull on a winter hat one last or next-to-last time. Good chance to think about how when all this is over, it'll be time to go looking for some sandals. Bone up on the intricacies of the double-switch, the Texas steal, the designated hitter. All that's not too far off now at all. Change the sheets. Wash the sinks. Cut your hair. When all this blows out and over, you're going to want to be ready.

Late Winter.

We turned cold. The fancies are no dummies. Gray low rolling clouds, quilted, over the top of us, all afternoon. February again in March. Or March in March. Maybe we got greedy. Nobody seems to want us to freeze, but they want us damn close. It's too soon for most everything except the daffodils. There's probably another cold snap coming after this. It's March. I don't know what else I could have been hoping for. We're not supposed to see the sun for days.

Spring Rain.

Tiny rain. Front porch. As much as they say it's going to be in the thirties tomorrow, it's damn hard to believe it now. That was a spring rain if I've ever smelled one. Warm and warm. Sun. Trees just ready to bloom all over. Then rain. And thirties coming. Oh, spring.

Tom Collins.

This is the weather we had today: cooler, noticeably so, but so deeply pleasant all the same. And this sort: I arrive at my 2:20 class to find the entirety of my class outside, asking if we can have class outside. It's cooler today than yesterday, I said. We know, they said. Y'all are all from Maryland or further north, aren't you, I said. Yes, they said. So this is spring, then, I said. Not yesterday. Today. Yes, they said. Something like that. You've about got it.

We had class outside.

And then TMR and I sprint home in time to salvage a wee social engagement we had scheduled having to do with the first Tom Collinses of the season, and yes, friends and fans of warm-weather libation, they were lemony and perfect and excellent and good and the evening held on a little for us down the block there on the CK and JK back and front porches, and it did not really cool off until after we had polished off the quarter-orange-juice jug of Collinses we walked down there with in the failing early spring light. There was yes ice and maraschino cherries and the Collins mix and the sparkly water and oh, even though it is soon enough going to be chilly and then even yes cold, tonight was spring and that was all there is to say about that, except for the lemons and the so-nice breeze.

Today was a long-sleeved oxford shirt and jeans and a happy walk back home.

Fair warning: something coming in. Gorgeous in the morning and gray thereafter—and chilly, come Thursday and the weekend. Probably going to have to close these windows back up for a spell. I'm just saying.

Still Warm.

Oh, the day: class outside even as class outside meant fiasco, like always, meant nine kids trying so hard to give a damn about four good poems and failing as often as not. And we did have four good poems, which is a better day than so many days, but the four good poems could not quite compete with seventies and sun and sun and seventies. Oh, the day.

Gonna be cold soon enough. Warm again, too, but all I'm saying is, Go outside. Now, tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening. House finches in both of the ferns now. Spring trying so hard to come on. We're not ready yet, but we're damn near there. Now come the cold snaps. Now come the frozen Bradford Pears. Happens every year like this. We can never bring it on all nice and easy-like. Always back and forth. But still: We are, I am telling you here in early March, damn near there.

Daylight Saved.

Or so they say. I won't believe it until tonight, when it's seven and still not dark. And I was in dire need of the switch, lost and gone hour or no: those 6:15 sunrises had started to wear thin.

We're 75 degrees and hugely sunny here on the front porch, with what I'd say is something between a gusty breeze and a breezy wind coming in out of the west and south. A pair of house finches are trying to nest in one of our new ferns, which is no good, since it's not really fern time and the plan was to bring them in next week or the week after to avoid what has to be a coming freeze. Now that plan is null and house-finchingly void. Plus we'll have to have a dead damn fern hanging on the porch post-freeze until the whole finch-making process runs its course. It's tough going here at 709, friends and fans of spring rites. Tough going, indeed.

The Bradford Pears, for those of you scoring at home, are right on the verge of blooming. The dogwoods look quite close. Some switch got flipped here in the new back yard and one of our varieties of weed is sending up tiny pale white blooms. It is right about on us. Best to make yourselves ready. Don't put the flannels in the attic yet, but get ready all the same.

Sprung Spring.

It's not over. We'll get another cool snap or two. Maybe a cold one. But a wee white butterfly is out on my front walk moving from pansy to pansy. It's in the sixties and we're nowhere near noon. As soon as I finish this cup of coffee I'm saddling the dog up and the two of us are pickuping out east to the Guilford County Prison Farm to buy us some Adirondack chairs for a very fair price. I called over there. They're open. The sheriff's deputy I got on the phone sounded like it was spring on his end of the line, too. Sounded like he could maybe do with a half-hour or so where he could sit in a chair and set his sheriff's deputy hat on the table beside him, big old tall sweating glass of ice water next to that. That is what he sounded like.

Weekend Weather.

Several cups of coffee later, my pretties, and the snow's all but melted and we're headed for sixty-six today, and—oh dear sweet baby Jesus in a zip-up rayon tracksuit—seventy six and sun for Saturday and Sunday. Those are near-record temps for the date, of course, but let's us not worry our little heads about our carbon footprints: Let's us pick out which porch to spend the weekend on, instead.

In Broken Glasses News, mine are, which means I come to you this morning live and in sunglasses, of the Rx variety, as I have been since midday yesterday. Taught my workshop in 'em. That'll instill confidence in the power of, say, filtering experience through the lens of one's main character. But Greensboro's the kind of town where if you phone around bright and early mewling and puking and beg and call people sir and ma'am and explain the nature of your emergency (which is that either you can conduct your fancy Friday-night-on-campus-deans-in-the-room-parents-weekend-honors-open-house thing in sunglasses, or they [the optometrists] can save your ass), you can have delivered unto your poorly insured self a reasonably-priced eye exam. All this means that later on today I'll be sporting me some fancy new lookers. Hopefully I'll be able to see farther and blink with aplomb, a la the run-faster-and-jump-higher theory of new shoes from the Stride-Rite in the mall. Can I wear them home, mommy? Can I? Well, Boo, I'm sure you can, but the question is, may you?

We did like us some grammar way back when at 2717 Goodfellows Road. We also liked to call me Boo.

I so well remember the first pair of glasses: Don't remember what grade—either first or second—but what I remember is coming out of the doctor's office and seeing leaves. I had no idea you could see leaves in the trees from far away. Until then they'd been green blurs. That was a day.

I'm sorry I left you stranded on Wednesday and Thursday, weatherers. But you know how it was: You knew this was coming. You could tell. Even in your coats, you could smell it warming up. We just had to have those chilly interstitial days to get to these ones. As for today: Get thee outside. Stay there. Go see something. Doctor's orders.

Ten, One.

Half an inch. It's a bad guess, but I've got officials of both the Canadian and American Weatherazzi on my side. Try out a little rain-to-snow or snow-to-rain conversion on the Google and you'll see that there can be quite a debate about this, but that short of melting whatever fell in your wheelbarrow and then measuring that, there's damn little consensus. I didn't have anything turned upright but the rain gauge, and it got its little hat of snow early on, apparently, which leaves me with the old 10:1 in x degree range, which we were, so. Surely this offends the purer of the weather gods, but perhaps we've always worshipped at the altar of the coarser ones, anyway. That look like sleet to you? I dunno. Well, maybe. Hang on. Yep. That's how it sometimes goes here at ANYLF's Southeastern Winter Weather Festival of Halfassed Instrumentation and Recording Methodologies. We didn't ever promise anybody anything other than our best, which is sometimes about as good as this.

The five inches of snow, by the by, were an ANYLF record, though we've only been at this two winters.

They want nearly 75 for the weekend. We've gone from needing the St. Bernard with the barrel of brandy around its neck to needing whatever dog it is that brings you beers and limes. For now: It's, ah, cold as ice out there. It's willing to sacrifice our love. But things will get better. Just wait for the rescue dog.

Big Snow.

So, OK, then.


We got about five inches up here on the hill at 709, starting around nine or ten last night. It's a dry, small-flaked snow, powdery and crisp and really something to see here as March comes in. In the park, it looked a lot more like six or eight inches. Don't know if the snow blew its way down into that bowl of land or if it just really did snow more down there—300 yards from here—but whichever, it's deeper there than here.



No real idea precisely how much precip to record—sorry, friends and fans of exactitude—but the fancy equipment here at ANYLF Spring Snow Headquarters got jammed:


This is kind of like when the anemometer gets blown off Mt. Washington. Don't be too terribly alarmed: We've got interns checking the PTI data and also checking the snow-to-rain conversion rates, and we'll have something shortly, I imagine. For now:


So. OK. Here at the brand-new WeatherCenter, it goes like this: We're melting off in the sun, and it'll be in the sixties by the end of the week. The streets look to be in good shape, but if it were my caution to exercise, that's what I'd be doing. Supposed to be 13 tonight. Basement's flooding every few hours from the big rain yesterday and whatever snowmelt situation is ongoing. There's probably water in the outbuilding, but there was water between the big house and the little house yesterday, which made exploratory missions inadviseable, and there wasn't/isn't anything I could do about it regardless, and a pretty comprehensive reno looms on that little shed's horizon, anyway, so we'll leave all that for now unexplored. What matters: It snowed, it snowed. Unto us a snow day is given. That, and some bookshelves. They're done. It snowed, and the books are out of their boxes. Those two things right there are two good things.

It's Happening.

Some. Don't get excited. Do your homework. But check out the window every little while or so. Maybe think about where those boots you bought in Boston might be.

March Snow?

And I'm only asking because I can't quite believe it, because even as the NOAA fancies promise it to us, and even as a quick check out the back shows ice on the trees, and a quick moment on the front porch says the sound of the raindrops hitting the ground has changed since this morning, has become something fatter, heavier, I just cannot quite say for sure that I believe in my heart of hearts we are going to have delivered unto us three to seven inches of snow by tomorrow morning.

To recap: I sat on the porch with the dog Thursday afternoon awaiting our houseguests. I wore shirtsleeves. We all of us had breakfast Friday morning on the table out back. It is going to be 68 next Saturday. Right now, though, it is just a hair over 32 degrees and it is pouring and it has been all day and it has been working itself up to this since give or take midday Friday when it just sort of started to cool off and friends and fans of weather I swear to you it smells and feels like snow and ice out there and there are icicles on the back deck railing and the radar is full from corner to corner and yet even with all of that I still cannot quite drag myself into the place of belief.

Everybody who's anybody is saying it's going to happen. Keep it here at ANYLF, though. We're not saying it's going to happen. All we're doing is hoping and trying to turn all the lucky trinkets lucky-side-up. But if and when it does happen, we'll perhaps have maybe one or two more things to say about it. So. Etcetera.

Either way, this is some weather.