Mending, Hopefully.

And now it's colder. It's genuinely cold. And here's what else, friends and fans of cold, and of colds: We here at 709 remain ill. This is the illest I've been with no fever that I can remember. The Thanksgiving cold threatens to stretch into Christmas. I am considering rioting. I may riot. What I may do is go in there and light the kitchen on fire and see what happens. I have demands.

The dog is curled into the space of maybe a sofa pillow on the sick bed I've adopted here in the overheated downstairs. AMR is upstairs, drugged and hoping for sleep. If we get enough dry days in a row here in the next week or so, and if I can find my sea legs, there will be no walls and then new walls on the outbuilding. Until then, here's hoping for deep breaths. For less coughing. For health by the solstice, the bottom of the year.

Taken Down.

It's a hell of a lot warmer out there—I left the house late afternoon, having not been outside in a while, in far too many shirts. All that wind made me think it would be colder. It is not. It will be. But that is not what I've come here to talk to you about tonight, friends and fans of windstorms.

I've come to tell you this and this only: things blown down between here and the puppet show: most Christmas trees at most Christmas tree lots. One traffic light. Two nativity scenes.

See you tomorrow.

Ill Weather.

People, it rains. It rains and it rains, and here is how much: three weeks ago I bought a flat of pansies to put in the front pots. They're still in the flat. I have not watered them. No matter. They look better now, three freezes on, than when they came home from the store. It rains.

And the cold will not abate, inside or out. Outside, winter sets in, and in style. One wants for snow, instead of rain, but though one is in the minority, one will take this: one likes the kind of weather that dictates when and in what amount coffee will be coming tomorrow. Or I do, anyway. And inside, CDC-Greensboro continues its lab work. We are petri dishes in here. We are ill in the way of preschoolers. Or lab rats. We do not sleep. We know our ways around the relevant drug info on the back of something like sixteen different packages of feel-pretty. We may not last the week.

Send help. Or cough syrup. Or whiskey. When will it end? Doesn't matter: I sleep downstairs until the plague passes. Cracking a window to hear the rain hit the driveway. Could be worse. I love that sound.

Old Songs.

And when we hear/the voices sing/the book of love will open up/and let us in. Not heard often in the Mr. Mister recording sessions, I bet: Should we pull that back a little?

I can't say we're recovered around these parts, but one of us felt well enough to spool the dog through the increasingly Xmas-light-lit neighborhood, which has to be an improvement. And we cooked a meal. And here it is nearly midnight, and ANYLF is up and awake to see it. Widespread killing frost these last two mornings, enough to take out anything left that didn't belong. December. On the mend. On the freeze. Here we go.

In Did You Order The Outbuilding Windows In Time News, I may not have, but going with stock sizes at the big box may be the better of lesser evils, anyway. We shall see. Almost no matter what: Newly buttoned building, new windows and doors, new stove, new insulation by the first of the year. If not, then all of that save the windows, which should make for an interesting building, an interesting January. You thought you liked the weather before, ATP?

More rain on the way, of course. This is what it used to be like here before, I hear. I've only been here ten years. Never seen it rain like this.

I love it. I love it better now that I can breathe. As soon as I can taste coffee, then Katie bar the door, whatever the hell that means.

Winter Weekend.

Friends and fans of weather, the Thanksgiving cold is a gift that will not stop giving, and so I tell you only this: it was gloriously cold and gray and rainy yesterday, and it was gloriously cold and clear this morning, and it is gloriously cold and graying back over now.

Fluids and medication. Medication and fluids. Got to heal up so I can get out and enjoy this.

Possible Snow.

What you need to know, friends and fans of weather, is not that it will snow, or even that it almost certainly won't, but that it could. That is what you need to know. That when you stepped out into the backyard late into the evening and thought you smelled those wet cold clouds moving through, you weren't wrong. That we may have seen a little fog earlier, and half of a shower, and that, yes, even though it was well into the forties, it's OK if you thought for a second the water on the windshield was a little syrupy.

Cold rain tomorrow. Maybe a little sleet. Maybe a little ice. Maybe a little snow. Probably not. But maybe. It may be winter. It looks like it's going to stay that way for a few days, even after the sun comes back out. Alright, then. Gloves. Plans. Sleep. Coffee. Cold.

December Second?

So it's windy out there, but the problem is that it's turned warm -- it was well down into the forties this morning, and it's edging up through the sixties now. The result? Everything's wet. Every surface. Front porch, cat porch. The inside of the now-unheated now-uninsulated shed is a good fifteen degrees colder than the outside temp, and so the windows are dripping condensation. And the fancies, as of now, want snow—the non-stick kind, but still, snow—on Saturday. Welcome, friends and fans of weather, to March. The seasons of no season at all continue apace. The rain continues like we now live somewhere it rains. I do not know what to tell you. The only thing I think I know to do is thank my brother for the illness he brought to Nashville and that's now settled into this house, and hope for clearer heads and better coffee—or the ability to taste said coffee, good or bad—by tomorrow. What I do know for sure: if you were, say, battling a Thanksgiving cold, well then, this would be the weather that would help you perhaps into and then back out of it.

There is good news: the electrician says I have enough electricity to do the electric things to the shed that need doing. The roofer says he can ridge-vent the thing for a pittance. The chimneyer says he wants to do the woodstove chimney on the cheap. Tune in next time, when we'll hear our hero say: it seemed like it wasn't going to cost anything, but then we went broke.

And it didn't even really rain enough (an inch? a little more?) to know for sure whether the French drain French-drained. Oh, folly. Oh, tilting at windmills. Oh, renovations. Oh, weathers.

Flood Watch.

It seems like we here on the Piedmont might know the words to this song:


That's the current (6:30 pm EST) satellite, and here's ye olde QPF for the next 24 hours:


Maximum rain value, as per our NOAA forecast: 2.75". Flood Watch until midnight on the 3rd.

People, it rains now. That's just all there is to it. This might be the last storm we ever see, and the whole of the staff here at ANYLF may well within a matter of weeks return to what we've always known best, which is drought-based complaint and concern, but for right here and now, on the heels of the second month this year where our measured rainfall exceeded our expected rainfall by more than seven inches, I think even a body like me would have to say it rains. Hey, test of the new French drain. Hey, unfixed sump pump. Hey, newly strangely (undiagnosedly) leaky front porch.

KFW, if you're listening in out there tonight, I want you to know that I saw Van Denton (a) wearing, last night on the T and V, the reddest sportcoat I've ever seen, and that (b) while wearing said coat, he said the internal pressure of this storm would be lower than that Ida thing that spun through here two weeks back. You know what, though, Weatherheads? It's the holiday season. Let's give that information away for free not just to KFW but to each and every one of you clicking in. My gift to you. Mine and Van Denton's, anyway.

If you live elsewhere, go on about your business. If you live here, though, or nearby (use the above maps if you need assistance), then hunker down.