Blue Lights.

We were out of coffee here at 27401, that most banal of things to report, lifewise, but it's true anyway, and it leaves the forecast on life support, on tea, but that's alright: we look a bit like London out there, and there's what seems to be a little squally rain on the way in out of the north and west, a fine way to carry us out the other side of a month that'll show us nearly eleven inches of rain before we're said and done, which will be a few short hours from now.

Coming this week, at 8 pm EST to a television near you: most of the old sixties Christmas specials. Charlie Brown. Rudolph. The Grinch. Hanging lights off the front of the house last night with TLK, it occurred to me that I like the season a hell of a lot better than I like the actual day itself. Even if it is a big-boy bike you're getting, a Diamondback without training wheels, there's something about the day that can't ever quite live up to whatever it is there is about November 30 or December 8 or the second Saturday out, going to the mall with your dad to shop for your mom—there's something about all the buildup that's better, something that gives you not quite hope, per se, but perhaps a general softness about the world, a belief, maybe, that as we wheel toward the darkest days of the year, the earth will in fact again tilt back the other way, and that we will warm and light ourselves once more. Or maybe it's just that we here at ANYLF are more inclined to worship at the altar of the solstice, and of weather, than we are anybody else's falderal. No matter: TLK, person extraordinaire, last night co-captained the operation back to the big box well after dark to buy more blue lights. Blue lights were where it was at, he asserted. Blue lights were still what was called for, even after we'd hung all the blue lights I had. So we did—buy more, that is, and hang those up, too—and so kicks off the season, whichever season it may be. Happy birthday, Frosty says, once they do whatever it is they do to him to bring him to life. This is before the tragedy in the greenhouse, of course.


We are home from Thanksgiving. Rescued from it, really. It is nearly December. There are low clouds. It is cool if not cold. Weather is on its way in. It is time for another cup of tea.

Momma Said.

Most of the fields on the ride in are browned over now, even though we haven't seen a freeze. I think I'm ready for one—I think I need some reminder of what we're up against. As it is, it sometimes feels as though we drag through the days and weeks with not nearly enough markers to know what to name everything. So goes November, friends and fans of these returning clouds. It's cool out there, but not so cool you need long sleeves for both layers. Oh, and that sound you hear may be the nest of bees inside my head. Or maybe it's just the one inside of yours.

Last day before Thanksgiving break. This thing gets a little more complicated every damn year. So does everything else, though, right? I think my momma may have said there'd be days like these. I think I just never believed her.

Oceans Apart.

Another big shield of rain seems headed 27401ward here this evening—this has the makings of one of those nights where you're just hoping it's still raining when you go to bed so you can crack the window and listen to it go. You may want to tick the heater up a degree or two with this strategy. Sorry, carbon footprint. Sometimes mental health wins out.

In shed news—and oh, Weatherheads, I know you're wondering about the shed—all the rest of the rotten and sometimes ant-infested insulation is out, and all the knowledge one might need about damage, water-based and otherwise, is there for the taking. Answer: some, but so much better than what I was expecting to find that even when 'It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas' came on Delilah (today's journaling prompt: 'happiness outside the box') on the way home from a Sunday night puppet show commitment, I listened to it, and I maintained my good humor. Oh, Delilah. Do you think he'll ever come back? I just get so lonely this time of year. AMR, riding shotgun, after 'It's Beginning...' bled into some sort of A Very Mariah Xmas: what'll she bleed to next? A Richard Marx song?

OK. Let's just stop right there, shall we? 'Right Here Waiting' was ABOUT me and my long-distance middle-school summer-camp relationships, OK? Or high school. A quick internet search suggests I may have been in ninth grade when that thing came out. STILL. Now is not the time for mocking Richard Marx. Or for reminding me that other people do things like discover The Clash in ninth grade. For a brief period of time, I felt that Richard Marx may have been important, or was at least chronicling my deeds in song. Hold on to the night, people. Hold on to the memories.

Cold and steady rain. This is the kind of forecast you would have sold your thumb for in August. Not your good thumb. Your other one. But still.

Morning Edition.

Saturday morning edition: in the van on the way to the beach, my brothers sharing the bench seat in the middle, the back bench all to myself, the rule of primogeniture, etc. Or: in the red VW bug, a 1968 ragtop, the one my dad got after somebody crunched his white 1964 one, McDonald's breakfast out there in his and my immediate future, a trip to the mall two weeks before Christmas to shop for my mom, a trip to the hardware store any time of year for six bolts, a machine screw, a switch. Back in that van for an early soccer game in Roswell, back in that bug for an early baseball game out at Morgan Falls, the dump-cum-baseball field complex north of where we lived. In every one of these let's make me eight or nine—not quite old enough to know anything more than that Scott Simon's voice meant good things. Later on it'd come to mean I was up way too early on a Saturday.

We went cold last night—left for the after-dark dogwalk with no jacket, and regretted it. Woke up early enough this morning to make the prospect of seeing some chilly weather, drinking a pot of coffee, and switching on the radio seem like exactly how to spend a thinly-clouded Saturday morning. And here comes the theme song for that second hour.

Strange Days.

It feels a little strange around here when the sun's out, like someone left the cover off of something. We've seen so much rain and fog and drizzle and general cloud these last two weeks I don't really know what to do with a day like today. I mean, I can remember last weekend, have it as a kind of a jeweled set of days that felt like this one already does, but I don't really remember anything specific about it. I remember the sunny days right now like I used to remember the rainy days, back before it really started raining again: they feel familiar, but I can't quite say much else for sure about them.

If it's sunny enough, maybe we'll crisp over enough to do a little raking. Maybe a trip to the big box for a few bags of mulch to cover over some of the post-French-drain mudfest that is the perimeter of the writing shed. For now: a second pot of coffee. Let's not do anything to get ahead of ourselves, OK? Let's hold right about here in the ten-thirty hour and see what might arrive next.

My Weather.

Or it would be, if it was twenty degrees colder. Still, I'll take these last two days. Pork stew. Brussels sprouts. Short ribs. Coffee. These are the foods you want to lean toward in times like this.

Heavy fog on the way home from the puppet show. Windshield-wiper fog.

Supposed to clear off tomorrow.

Wintertime Barometer.

In order to determine the heaviness of the fog, one might, if one was up and about and padding around the house, determine whether or not the steeple, now that the leaves are down, was visible from the back windows. This morning: not visible. The fog, then: heavy.

Not so heavy that we can't see the houses next door, so it's not like we're entirely alone on this planet, but it does seem possible that there's only a very few of us left. One lovely thing about the fog: so, so quiet out there. And unless I'm crazy, it seems to be thickening a little.

Happy Tuesday to those of you who are not yet needing to see the sun.

French Drained.

First, see if you can get it to rain eight inches in one month, seven of those in a week. If you have any normally-waterlogged areas, this will amplify all of the situations possible: it will show you where your drainage problems are, and it will also make the digging—there is going to be some digging—easier.

Determine that every single person who's looked at it, who's told you even one thing about it, is right—you really need to drain the entire frontage, plus some, of that outbuilding. 27 feet. A 27-foot trench, 12-18 inches deep and 24 inches wide, is what's called for.

Do it in a weekend.

Here's what fit in the trench, with room to spare: 2,050 pounds of pea gravel.

Which means—and this is only a guess, but I wheelbarrowed the dirt out, and the gravel back in, and I feel like I can say with some authority that the exceptionally wet clay weighed about what the gravel did—at least 2,050 pounds of dirt up the hill and through the driveway and back down the hill to the downhill mouse's yard—she's got drainage problems of her own, has some shifting of the grade in mind.

I did landscaping in my teens and twenties. I remember dump truck loads of gravel and of soil in clients' driveways, remember having to move that amount of shite in a day or two.

Oh, teens and twenties. Right now the fucking tops of my feet hurt (sorry, kids). Everything, everything hurts. My teens and twenties may, it turns out, have been 15-20 years ago.

If we ever get water in that building again, I will probably have to kill the French. I will be all, Please hold still while I club you in the head with this sack of gravel, s'il vous plait.

Two astonishingly beautiful days to go with all this pain, though. Sun and seventies. So beautiful. So. One more day of that tomorrow, and then we cool off, and that'll be beautiful, too. Keep it tuned here: there may be keen interest next time it rains.

Postscript: cut to me cutting a small piece of the landscape fabric off the roll after I'd dumped 2,050 pounds of gravel into the trench—I came inside and made a little pouch and ran it under the sink to make sure it was water-permeable. Nice timing, me. Result of experiment: it is. I would have had to kill myself with a sack of gravel otherwise.