Living In the World, Not on It

On 1 December I posted the Old Farmer's Almanac information and other fun tidbits for this month. If you read it, you may recall that I described the Ember Days that come up four times a year, predicated on specific Roman Catholic holy days. Today is the first Ember Day in December, and by folklore, determines the overall weather in January. Here is a reminder of the Ember Days and how they work: Ember Days: The four periods formerly observed by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches for prayer, fasting, and the ordination of clergy are called Ember Days. Specifically, these are the Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays the follow in succession following (1) the First Sunday in Lent; (2) Whitsunday - Pentecost; (3) the Feast of the Holy Cross, September 14; and (4) the Feast of St. Lucia, December 13. The word ember is perhaps a corruption of the Latin quatuor tempora , "four times." Folklore has it that the weather on each of the three days foretells th...

The Blue Memory Meme, Part Two Welcome back to Sunday Stealing which originated on WTIT: The Blog authored by Bud Weiser. Here we will steal all types of memes from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent memes. You may have heard of the expression, “honor amongst thieves”. In that age-old tradition, we also have our rules. First, we always credit the blog that we stole it from and we will “fess up” to the blog owner where we stole the meme. We also provide a link to the victim's post. (It's our way of saying "Thanks!") We do sometimes edit the original meme, usually to make it more relevant to our global players, to challenge our players, sometimes to select that meme's best questions, or simply to make it less repetitive from either this new meme or recently asked questions from a prior featured meme. Let's go!!! Today we ripped off a blogger and...

And what can that mean, you ask? On Saturday, 29 October, the Snow Fairy stopped in early to give us a visit. And she didn't stop by, ring the bell and find us not home, and head out on her way. She dropped off a bombshell. It was rain in the early morning. Then around 1030 it became a mix of rain and snow. By 1100 it was huge, wet, heavy flakes that began coating the branches almost immediately. The ground was much too warm to hold the snow until later on but the trees, heavy with leaves in their array of lovely autumn colours, were building up snow too quickly. It was not long before it was eerily quiet as fewer and fewer people were out and about. And then we could hear it: creaking, bumping noises and finally pops and reports (that last was the horrific sounds of branches breaking). When I looked out the windows around 1430, there were a lot of really big branches on the ground, littering the backyard with leaves and debris. But those leaves weigh a lot more than m...

"Here in Charleston, the weather has gone from about 96° to about 72° — or even less — in a matter of days. The weathermen say we shouldn’t get used to this too quickly: more hot weather is on the way. But in the meantime, we’ve been able to enjoy much cooler, fall-like weather. Which got me thinking about this week’s topic. Be sure to check back this week and click on the links of bloggers who play along in the comments below! It’s a great way to find blogs you may not have visited and to keep the conversation going! Here is this week’s “ Sunday Seven ” question. Either answer in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your blog (with a link here), and then comment here with a link back to your blog so that everyone else can visit! Permission is not granted to copy the questions to message boards for the purpose of having members answer and play along there. Enjoy!" THIS WEEK’S QUESTION : Name your seven things you’re looking forwar...

Before posting this week’s edition of the Saturday Six , I took Scotty to the dog park. I figured it would be a good idea to let him burn off some energy before it got too hot. Sure enough, after about forty minutes, he was looking for a cool spot to lie down and rest, so I got him back into the car and back home. He had fun playing with a German Shepherd, a Boxer two Huskies and a howling Beagle. He’s now sprawled out in the middle of the floor with a big smile on his face. With that task done, it’s now time for another set of six questions! Thanks for dropping by! Be sure to check back this week and click on the links of bloggers who play along in the comments below! It’s a great way to find blogs you may not have visited and keep the conversation going! Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your blog… But don’t forget to leave a link to your blog so that everyone else can visit!...

That's right folks. If the arthquake we had yesterday wasn't enough, heeeeeeeere's Irene! "If the Virginia quake wasn't enough, authorities warn residents to watch out for Hurricane Irene Emergency officials say New Jersey residents primary concern isn't the Virginia earthquake that shook the entire East Coast—a reported hurricane could be headed this way in a few days. The National Weather Service reports that Hurricane Irene—which already has rolled through the Bahamas—is expected to land in North Carolina by Saturday and then travel northward. According to the AccuWeather website , Irene could "flirt with the Delmarva [peninsula] and New Jersey and then on to eastern Long Island and southeastern New England." The New Jersey Office of Emergency Management said via its website that the threat may be heaviest for shore areas, which could experience tidal and storm surge flooding. NJOEM offers these tips to make sure ...

There are none scheduled for tonight. Tomorrow, however... (This is my image but it is from 2002 - it is bloody hard to get these kinds of stills.) On Thursday night at 2200, I heard the long, low rumble of not-to-distant thunder... a sound that always brings joy to my heart! I live for thunderstorms - the bigger, noisier, more dramatic, the better! I look forward to summers for this more than anything else. I just delight in the windy, wily, wild weather. I tend to be a person of extremes (although I'm not wild about extremely cold weather - there I draw the line), so if it's gonna be stormy, it has to be WOW stormy. If it is gonna snow, it should be a blizzard. Yup. Extremes are much more exciting! So I listened for a few minutes - the thunder always precedes the light show. I could hear it with little silence in between rolling soft thunder. There was no lightning yet. But as the storm approached, the thunder was longer, rolling from side to side. We are only 30...

Luis and I determined that we really want to see Cirque du Soleil's Zarkana . So even though I was up and got very little sleep last night, we were up and out of the house by 1000 heading to Hoboken to part in one of the many Park & Ride buildings that festoon the lower road (two below and parallel to Washington Avenue) to take the Path train. To give you an idea how long it has been since I've been in NYC, I had no idea that the cost of the Path train has gone up to $1.75 for a one-way ticket. I still thought it was $1.50 - duh! But the Path trains run the same as always - every fifteen minutes on the quarter-hour mark. The trains are kept quite well and there's a telly screen with no sound that is clear made for this - it had local news, weather seven-day forecasts and little tidbits that are printed and scrambled words and such. It was not at all crowded going in (I was confident that few people had any great desire to be traipsing about the hotter-than-hot confines...

I really hope you played last week’s edition of the Sunday Seven , but if you didn’t, that’s okay. Last week, I asked you to list seven things you were grateful for that week. It’s often easy to come up with a handful of things that you’re grateful for. But what if you had to come up with more than a handful? Are you really aware of how much you have to be thankful for? This week’s question requires an adjustment in your mindset depending on whether you played last week. If you answered last week’s question, then you must list seven things you didn’t list last week. If you didn’t play last week, make yourself a list of seven things, then take a few moments and make another list of seven. That second set will be harder…and that’s the point. Give me items 8-14 on your list. That’s this week’s challenge! Oh, that's not fair! You saw that comment and did this! Yikes. 1. Vacation time (more than I could possibly know what to do with) so Luis and I can travel 2. Thai foo...

Welcome to Saturday: 9 . What we've committed to our readers is that we will post 9 questions every Saturday. Sometimes the post will have a theme, and at other times the questions will be totally unrelated. Those weeks we do "random questions," so-to-speak. We encourage you to visit other participants posts and leave a comment. Because we don't have any rules, it is your choice. We hate rules. We love memes, however, and here is today's meme! Saturday 9: White Wedding 1. Tell us about the most recent wedding you attended. Wow... who's was the most recent wedding I've attended? Oh, yes, I know! It was a coworker's wedding - mine, for a refreshing change, not one of Luis' - and it was in 2009. They were married on a boat and was wonderful - romantic, sweet and the best music! 2. Do you enjoy attending weddings, or do they bore you to tears? Most weddings do bore me to tears. What can I say? The standard, usual wedding is boring and except for ...

...I wanted a day in the hammock and I got it... But it wasn't as satisfying as it normally is. Had I done it yesterday it would have been much more worthwhile. Yesterday was a little cooler, with nice breezes and blue skies all along. That would have been ideal. Instead I traded that for today, which was sullenly hot (and far worse when the sun managed to shine on me), with non-moving air, hazy skies, humidity to some degree and in the rare event of a soft breeze it was a cold, wet zephyr. What the hell...? Now it looks overcast and unfriendly just like it has last several days (excepting yesterday). Groan. Upcoming weather: it figures. A whole weekend of overcast, showers, possible thunderstorms (I know I love thunderstorms but not so much that I want them getting in the way of my hammock-bonding time. Unless we had non-stop thunderstorms - that would be pretty amusing. I meant to say "amazing" but amusing works as well. Hmmm... for some reason I am suddenly terribly ov...

...in the same place! Every so often, you get to see something that almost never happens. We got blown out at 18:04, back-up was blown out at 18:05 and third rig was blown out at 18:06. All three of us went out, and all three of us took people to the same hospital. And in order, here is the image: This is one of those things that might happen once in a decade. But here we are, in order - 66-1 (duty crew), 66-2, and 66-3. That is so cool! 65 pulled this off last year sometime, although they were counting down - 65-3, 65-2, and 65-1. I might have posted that image on here, too. It's just that cool. And it is the rarest confluence of events that we pulled this off - and that they did, too. That is pretty neat! What are the odds? And then we were graced with this monster storm with cloud to cloud lightning and blustering winds and long, booming thunder. That is the best!

Here's why: 'MANHATTAN — The city is set to sizzle under near record temperatures Wednesday as a heat advisory went into effect and the city opened cooling centers. The mercury is expected to touch 95 with high humidity — and no relief tonight. The heat is not expected to dip below 78. Tomorrow is expected to be even hotter, with highs of 97 forecast. Wednesday's heat matches the highest temperature ever recorded on June 8, which was in 1933, according to the Weather Undergound . Officials sought to get the word out abou t cooling centers located all over the city, including some of Manhattan's public space like libraries, senior centers and community centers. Experts advised anyone without an air-conditioned place to spend the day to travel to the closest cooling center, and to drink plenty of liquids throughout the day. Anyone who believes they may be suffering heat stroke is urged to call a doctor immediately or...

A group of more than 100 scientists and experts say in a new report that California faces the risk of a massive "superstorm" that could flood a quarter of the state's homes and cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. Researchers point out that the potential scale of destruction in this storm scenario is four or five times the amount of damage that could be wrought by a major earthquake. It sounds like the plot of an apocalyptic action movie, but scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey warned federal and state emergency officials that California's geological history shows such "superstorms" have happened in the past, and should be added to the long list of natural disasters to worry about in the Golden State. The threat of a cataclysmic California storm has been dormant for the past 150 years. Geological Survey director Marcia K. McNutt told the New York Times that a 300-mile stretch of the Central Vall...

I'm guilty. I gripe and complain and say that now the snow has gotten old. But then in the midst of our third snowstorm in as many weeks, I'm caught up in and blown away by how lovely and quiet it all is. In the midst of life and insanity is a ghostly but lovely world blanketed in cold fluffy snow. It is staggeringly lovely. All of the South Africans have bailed out of New Jersey to explore warmer climes; two are on a cruise ship through the Caribbean Seas, two re hiking through Arizona and the American Southwest and enjoying the desert views there. One has gone to Las Vegas and I don't recall what else is on the agenda. And my beloved friend, who loves to give me hugs, he is in either Las Vegas or has moved on to San Francisco (I did warn him that the Golden Gate Bridge is orange, not gold, in colour.) It's undoubtedly nice to be out in warmer climates when the area you live in gets nailed with snowstorms on a regular basis. But still, I can't help but appreciate t...

You would think that this would be a bit more wow! than you'd think. I had gone out to my hammock around 15:40, only to see a brightly blue sky with not a single stray cloud anywhere. Okay, it must be OK, the forecast was off and there'd be no storm approaching. Well, alrighty then! I hooked up my ear covers, started up my iPod, and set up my beautiful hammock. I lay in it and it swung from side to side gently, eventually stopping. The stopping was disappointing - once the hammock was in its normal spot, nothing moved. I mean nothing: not a single leaf twitched, not a blade of grass quivered, nothing. Not a breath of moving air. It was only 79°F but it was 84% humidity - disgusting. So I lay in my hammock, and did not even read page... whatever page I was on! I lay there in the heat and humidity, sweating with my iPod playing, realising that this is very warm. But in moments I fell asleep. Sheesh. I slept for a good long time, from 18:00 to 19:47. I would have remained sleepin...

The upcoming hurricane season could be a top 10 active year, a stark contrast from the relatively calm 2009 season. AccuWeather.com Chief Hurricane Meteorologist Joe Bastardi predicts a total of 16-18 storms this season. To put that in perspective, only eight years in the 160 years of records have had 16 or more storms in a season. The season should start early with one or two threats by early July, and stay late with additional threats extending well into October. His forecast team expects at least six storms to impact the United States coastline--slightly more than one out of every three. In a normal year, one out of every five named storms (20 percent) in the Atlantic basin impacts the United States. In the 2005 season, 36 percent of the storms affected the United States, while 50 percent impacted the United States in 1998 and 2008. "From the standpoint of number of storm threats from the tropics to the United States coastline, we will at least rival 2008, and in ...

It really was a long weekend. Normally five days is a little too long, but for once I really needed it. I've been going at 124% since April and while that is an expectation through May, while the hiring is happening in bulk, that's fine but timing and events conspired to make the headaches be much more than just the norm. I was ready for the norm; no one is prepared for what isn't expected or on the radar. At the same time, my weekend came with a price tag. I suppose there is the you can't have everything factor and this is it. (You can get the details on the 3 July post entitled Geriatrics and Pediatrics .) If there is not too much stress in this or that part of your life, then it will show up somewhere. I don't know if this is Fate's way of reminding us not to become complacent, but that is as good as any theory. In the world of don't tempt fate, here's a tip: don't carry too many items in your arms while walking on hot sand in Crocs. At least it ...

This is not Oklahoma! If you believe that the only states to get the joy of twisters are in Tornado Alley, you are so mistaken. Tornadoes occur in every state, but some states average more than others per year. New Jersey averages three per year; Texas averages 124. I realise Texas is considerably bigger, however, I prefer the odds here. New Jersey is small but you can't fit 124 New Jerseys into Texas. I'll take my chances here. And what are the odds that I will encounter another tornado in my lifetime? I already had one roar down the road less than 200 yards from our first house. That was in May 1999, in Parsippany. I still live in Parsippany, across town from our first house, but really, what are the odds? Slim. I hope... That was scary as hell. And it wasn't the typical tornado. Most tornadoes occur between 1500 and 1900, with 1700 as the peak point. Most of them boil across flat land (hence the popularity of Tornado Alley). But tornadoes can kill at time, any moment. Th...

I took this image in 2002 with my first digital camera. I stood outside, under a tiny overhang in the backdoor and clicked until I got not only this but one other image of lightning. Pretty neat! I love this stuff: For those of you who think reading in the bathroom is weird, just remember, these are all books with facts. The Uncle John Bathroom Reader Institute books are fun, loaded with interesting information and have different size bits to fit your time needs. And the tidbits are not always what you'd think. I read about how basketball came about. They clearly wrote if for the non-sports enthusiast, like me. So here is this one-pager: "HOW EN-LIGHTNING Zap! BRI member Kurt Stark requested these facts about lightning. Every second, there are 100 to 125 flashes of lightning somewhere on Earth. A lightning bolt can be anywhere between 200 feet and 20 miles long, but the average length, cloud-to-ground, is two to ten miles. Lightning speeds toward the Earth at an average of 200...