Warm Snap.

By the time I got the electrician and the chimneyer out of here, it was almost four o'clock, but that left plenty of time to take the dog downhill to the park, where seven hundred thousand other Gate-Citiers were celebrating the thirty or so extra degrees we received today above and beyond what had this year been our mean and median. What a day it was. It was a day so nice I've almost recovered from having spent it watching work go on in the building instead of doing work inside the building. It was a day so nice you just kept standing in the window, or on the deck, remembering what this felt like. This felt like greener lawns, is what it felt like.

Rain coming. Big old springish-looking storm coming up out of the gulf, out of Texas, which means it'll be springish, but not in the way it was today: it'll be wet and dark and cold again, and we'll see temps in the forties by Sunday. If ANYLF had to go on camera with an official guess, we'd say an inch of rain. Maybe a little more. We'd say this: If you had the better part of half a cord of oak stacked in your driveway, you might ought to head to the big box for a tarp. If you had pansies that looked freeze-shocked, then this little storm just might do the trick. If you felt like today saved you, though, then we'd say you may want to lay up with a bottle of scotch and some Wheat Thins to hold you over until the sun comes out again. This was not January. This was not how it goes. I mean, sure, it goes like this sometimes, but don't go looking for crocus blooms just yet. We're a ways off from that manner of thing.

The building just goes on and goes on. Which is good. Because the (new) novel is ankle-deep in the sand.