Leap Dreams.

Dream from two nights ago: a five-story grocery store, with escalators, and Phil Collins on endless loop. On one floor: all dairy.

Dream from last night: a four-story used bookstore and no music, but a seriously intricate interstate system directly next to the bookstore which I had to use to (a) change levels and (b) take the Toad to visit my parents and my cousin, who each lived in different hotels in the bookstore, but at different exits off the interstate.

All my dreams used to be celebrity mashups (see: Sean Connery and Stevie Wonder in a pistol duel in a cul-de-sac; Alan Alda picking nits from my fur). Then, for a period of many years, they were epic adventure chases taking place in massive eat-play-live complexes. Perhaps now I'm moving on to split-level single-purpose retail.

In weather (because why else continue?): Big, big tornadoes back west, so keep an eye on what looks increasingly windy and iffy and roiled out there in 2740X -- we're more than warm enough to spin something into a branches-down thunderstorm, if not worse. The fancies seem to say our big threat will be overnight, but I think maybe don't go anywhere, whether to bed or just to the grocery, however many levels it may have, without having a quick look at the radar. Or the sky. If it's February, friends and fans of the reconfigured USDA hardiness zones, it must mean springtime tornadoes. So what if it's only February on a technicality. It's still February.

Flesh Wound.

Well, in advance of what could be one of the last half-cold snaps late this weekend and into next, in between the space breaks this morning I camp-axed some red oak into pencils for kindling, and in so doing sent a tiny smithereen into my right bird-giving finger, which, since I am a hunt-and-pecker, is also, as it turns out, my dominant o-p-k-l-j-i-m-n-y finger, among other prominent letters. Damn you, high school self, for half-assing typing. But thanks, middle-school and high-school self, self-appointed surgeon to the younger twin brothers, flamer of needles, digger-outer of splinters. A difficult typing afternoon, friends and fans of the just-resucitated novel, has been maybe ameliorated by the sewing needle and the tweezers.

My finger still hurts, I told AMR. Do you want to do something about it? she asked. And so I did.

Why have a blog if not to report the shockingly, aggressively mundane? In other news, Eric Chilton's kid goes to my kid's preschool, it snapped warm today, it'll rain and snap warmer tomorrow, and warmer still on Thursday. The lawns green. The Toad uses verbs. The novel's not dead. I also use that finger for punctuation. I surgered it (sure it's a word) right before I sat down here, and already it feels better. Long-lost Weatherheads of the interwebs, I tell you this: tomorrow is a free day. A leap day. The moon keeps hanging itself into the western evening sky alongside Venus and Jupiter in a way that makes one want to say something about it. We are warmer and warmer. We have not passed out of kindling season. We may not need kindling for days.

Spring Storm.

The above is a current-temp snapshot from 4 pm Friday, one way to look at the storm that blew through and landed us two beautiful crisp days and now this one, a low drizzly slog in the forties. Today's a Guilford County teacher workday, sadly and not sadly, meaning no preschool, and so no work in the shed, but also meaning a reasonably lovely Toadbound morning first at the Children's Museum (airplane, slide, fear of fire and mail trucks) and then at the little downtown pub that tries so hard. I want it to be slightly better, the pub, but I also partly want it to be a half-mile walk from some tube stop in out-of-the-way London, which makes me a simpering asswipe, so perhaps I should just shut up and be thankful. And they make a fine soup. Actually, more than one. As for the Friday storm, in case you missed it: beautiful, all the wind in the world, many untethered items blown around the front and back yard, a very thin line of storms at suppertime and then sun again, and those plummeting temperatures. Yes, it was thirty degrees colder in Jefferson than in Greensboro at 4. Yes, it was thirty degrees colder in Greensboro by nightfall.

They want to give us spring back, friends and fans of weather, beginning tomorrow. I've seen Japanese magnolias starting to bloom here and there. The daffodils may already be past peak. All of this is weeks and weeks early. Still, Friday, when it was so warm, when I had the double doors thrown wide open in the shed, when every now and then (and finally, finally) the sentences weren't like bloodletting, and when that good breeze blew, I felt ready. It's one thing to have a warm December and January, which we did. It's unearned, among other things. It's quasiapocalyptic. It's another, though, to make it to late February and have it snap springlike again. By then—by now—you start to feel a little readier. Maybe you shouldn't, but you do.

Local Forecast.

And it did storm—can I off the top of my head remember a February thunderstorm?—through midnight, big wind, big rain, not for long, but still. Enough to make you pine for the weather even as it was ongoing, if you were the sort to do such a thing, which etcetera, and so, internet, hello, the weather returns. That which you least need—yesterday's forecast for the 2740X—returns. What else do you require for now? I still need my sea legs back, so I'll report only this for this evening: It was warm enough tonight to think that burgers on the grill might be a good idea, and it was. Or they were. The Toad's window upstairs is open an inch or two. He's dead asleep. It's February. We ate as a family. We're a damn sitcom. Tonight, on a very special episode of ANYLF, burgers. Fake spring. Cooler over the weekend. Keep it tuned here. Good night and good luck, Mrs. Whoever-you-are, wherever you are. Wind, they say. So watch for that.

It's Storming.

It's late February. We had no real winter. The dog's freaked because a line of storms seems to be coming through. It rumbled out there a minute ago. I'm back. I thought I was done, but I'm back.