Braves Win.

We came through fine and fine, which is less than can be said for locales west of the mountains and south of those same mountains. A seasonally forgotten quirk of living here, in the near-shadow of the mountains: Big lines of storms coming from way due west rarely have time to regain their same brutal intensity after they cross the mountains. Bad for Nashville and Knoxville. Good, I guess, for us and ours. Plenty of rain. A little thunder and lightning. Not much wind, and no hail.

It did hail on the Atlanta Braves, who were five runs, fourteen hits, no errors, to the Nationals' four runs, fourteen hits, no errors. Ten innings. Another bullpen collapse. Blame the nickel-sized hail that fell on them mid-game, I guess, but if there's one thing my late-night/early-morning half-fevered coughing jag taught me, it was these two things: (1) do not get the flu, and (2) no sense getting excited about the Braves in a division this competitive if the pen can't even hold the Nats in your home opener. I've seen the closer pitch twice so far this year, once in Philly and once at zero-dark-thirty last night, and while some of his stuff is fancy-fancy, he makes me nervous, like I want to sit him down and ask him if he's OK, if maybe he wants to talk about his girlfriend, or whether or not his dogs are fully up on their shots, or if the thunderstorms scared him.

They scared the dog. She was under the kitchen table at noon. We have never had a kitchen table before. This is helping the dog in her barometric duties. And me in mine. No dog under the table today. No storms.

Typical April forecast upcoming: Days like this, where you'll want both short and long sleeves, depending, and then also days like yesterday. Don't look here for any kind of guarantee about which day will be which, except this: Yesterday was not such a good day to go to the ballpark. Today is better. That's about all. Less forecast. More outside. More porch. The flu, friends and fans of respiratory health, it keeps you from the porch.

Spring Storms.

OK, people. We here at ANYLF missed the freeze, or we partially missed it—I have a fever dream of wrapping AMR's peonies with a Barbie blanket, and as much, friends and fans of euphemism, as I'd like for that to be one, conditions have not allowed—but we are back, the entirety of the crackerjack FirstCast Forecast Team, The One You Know You Can Trust. We are all of us back from the flu, or mostly so. There is a lingering cough. There is also, ah this:


Thanks, Weather Underground. Thanks also weather itself (located here for the sane among you, and here for the jackshit crazies) for giving us such a fine day to come back to. I sadly end-of-flu-slept through what looks like it was one hell of a porch morning, but there will be others, presumably, unless we are wiped clean from the face of the earth not by the first round, the round that's bearing down now on The Wilkesboros, as the local fancies like to say, but by what could be a second round, way back there in Nashville. For those of you scoring at home, ANYLF Global Firstcast Headquarters is located approximately one-and-one-half frozen peas west of Raleigh on the above map, unless you click on it, in which case let's say a dime.

This will be our first storm here at 709. How to know where to look: Walk to the kitchen window, lean forward, peer to the right. Better: Step out to the back porch and stand there with your cup of coffee and see if you've rid enough of the flu to smell it coming.

'Tis the season, I reckon. The newsies have it that they took it on the chin in Arkansas last night. Time to start keeping a slightly closer eye on the sky out there, everybody. Good luck in Arkansas, good luck in Nashville, in The Wilkesboros, in all the 274XXs, and everywhere else in the Forecast Area. It's April. It has been for several days. This is what that means.

Heal Thyself.

Oh, friends and fans of the semi-mild flu, save yourselves. Or just take a lot of Day and Nyquil. Dosage information? We don't need no stinking dosage information. Just make it stop.

And it may be all the acetaminophen (try to spell that without your store-brand day-time sinus congestion & pain box nearby) coursing through what remains of my veins, but I'm feeling better, well enough, anyway, to make some kind of attempt at the forecast here: It's so damn beautiful out there I cannot even take it. It's so beautiful that I think I'm feeling better. I's homicidally beautiful out there. And the azaleas, they come on, and the dogwoods, they survived FreezeFest '09.

We're pushing the upper sixties out there, and the windows-down ride back home on US 70 shows even the oaks starting to do something, bloom, I imagine, since it's a little too soon for leaves. Soon the maple whirligigs. Soon the baby birds. Soon the weekly mowing, though judging from the conditions here at 709, we may have already passed that point.

A little something dropping in tomorrow night, and marginally cooler behind that. But, but and but: this here may just turn out to be flu-curing weather. I was down and down until that truck ride home.

Tender Plants.

From our pals over there at the NWS/Raleigh:

A VERY COLD AIR MASS WILL FILTER INTO THE REGION TONIGHT THROUGH EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING. WHILE TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO FALL TO AROUND FREEZING... A LIGHT WIND IS LIKELY TO PERSIST THROUGH OUT THE NIGHT. THE WIND WILL AID IN KEEPING TEMPERATURES FROM FALLING MUCH BELOW FREEZING.

EVERYONE WITH AGRICULTURAL OR HORTICULTURAL INTERESTS... AND THOSE WITH TENDER PLANTS... SUCH AS NEWLY PLANTED ANNUALS... PERENNIALS... AND ORNAMENTAL TREES WITH NEW GROWTH... SHOULD PLAN ACTIONS TO PROTECT THEM FROM THE EXPECTED FREEZE TUESDAY NIGHT.

So: Sheets over the azaleas, but a new hope for the dogwood out front: it may just come through this thing. We shall see.

Mainly cloudy and chilly out there. Mainly flu-ridden in here, which accounts for the spotty freezecasting of late. Still: The weather stops for no man. Good luck out there, those of you with agricultural interests. Those of you with no interest in agriculture whatsoever have no reason to be reading this, but good luck to you, as well.

Freeze Coming?

Hate to say it, but things look bad. Here's the NWS:

MUCH COLDER AIR WILL OVERSPREAD ALL OF NORTH CAROLINA MONDAY NIGHT AND TUESDAY. HIGHS TUESDAY MAY HOLD IN THE 40S OVER THE NORTHWEST PIEDMONT. AS THE WINDS DIMINISH AND THE SKIES BECOME CLEAR TUESDAY NIGHT AND EARLY WEDNESDAY... A HARD FREEZE WILL BE LIKELY. LOWS BY WEDNESDAY MORNING SHOULD FALL INTO THE 25 TO 30 RANGE.

Not everybody's saying freeze just yet, but it has been one of those things where just about every time you check, the numbers get lower, so. Get the sheets ready, people. Those azaleas won't cover themselves.

Oh: Four runs, eight hits, no errors for the Braves. One run, four hits, no errors for the Phillies. Baseball's back.

Early Game.

Windows down and dog riding shotgun first to the bank and then to the market this morning, and there was that cool on the breeze, a sort of serious, abiding cool, and I knew I knew it, knew that smell, but couldn't quite place it until we turned some corner and the wind blew through the car just right and then there it was: Little League baseball, 9:00 game, long sleeves under your uniform shirt. We were the A's, I think, that year, the one I've got in mind, and this was before uniform hat technology got all fancy, or I played in a less fancy Little League, or something, but our hats were green foam up front and white mesh in the back, and they had iron-on velveteen yellow letter As on them. That hat is, I believe, still on the top shelf of my old closet back in 30328. We'll go on and say that was also the year I hit my one and only home run, as well as the year in practice when I caught a towering pop-up with my eye. Stood under it and watched it all the way in.

More about baseball later, I suppose, since the Braves open against the Phillies Sunday night. For now: seventy today, seventy-five tomorrow. Even in the face of all that, the FreezeWatch keeps on keeping on.

It's not even noon. Time for more coffee, a few projects, the middle of the day. Warming up out there. Not gonna need those long sleeves all day, I don't think.

Big Rain.

Let's just cover the basics for now: Huge storm. Big as pretty much the whole Southeast. Rain off and on all day, rain tonight, maybe some storms overnight, and then some rain tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon, though: Sun and seventies. They think. And just in case they're wrong, they want to pretty much give us sun and seventies Saturday and Sunday, too.

Oh, and this: The ANYLF Late Freeze Watch 2009 is on. NOAA wants 32 degrees Tuesday night. And the damn dogwood will, of course, be in full bloom.

Oh, and this: We are, for now, out of drought.

Fool's Fog.

One of the new barometers over here: Can you see the steeple? In this fog—a huge, dampening fog of the sort I've only really ever seen driving over mountains in NC or TN, or at least that's how I've got it remembered—you cannot. You can see where the lights on top of the church gym think it probably ought to be, and if you hold one eye closed you can decide you can see what would, if it were a real belfry, be the belfry light, but as ANYLF-caliber measuring systems go, this is a desteepled fog.

This is the kind of fog where you tug your boots back on and go stand on the front walk and watch the porch lights blocks down soften themselves into blurs. This is the kind of fog where if you had sleeping kids upstairs, you'd go and wake them up to show them: Look, you'd say, this is fog. This is what the fancies mean when they say that. Now go back to sleep and stop asking for glasses of milk, please.

I'd take a picture, but it wouldn't matter. Here's how it is: The dogwood out front is barely blooming, most of the petals still green, and some just white—but they're all of them full of water, of fog, collecting what's there to be collected, which is, this first night of April, plenty.