Tag Archives: Weather

Autumn is truly here

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I got an audio book from Audible today, for the Autumn season … it’s not a “Halloween” thing, we “don’t do halloween”. It’s a spooky audio book though.

The cool weather has finally arrived. It was unseasonably warm (really hot) just the other week, and the last four or five days has been heavenly. Tonight we have frost advisories out and just to the north in the more mountainous areas there are freeze warnings.

I find that I have come alive now that Autumn is here in truth and spirit. Summer is nice (when in A/C), but it puts me in doldrum mode moreso than not overall, dulled senses. Autumn means I can wear boots and heavier skirts and I LIKE that, for some reason, though I am a very sensitive person to too many layers, itchy seams, bulky seams, ick ugh gooky yuk.

In this vein I like cashmere, thin soft sweaters made of cashmere are so ultra lightweight and oh so very warm.

Silk mixed with cotton or cashmere or wool makes for a nice garment. In the south the cotton mix is alright for some things, but you Northern-Clime folks, don’t do cotton. Due wool and silk.

Pure silk is pure heaven. Silk dresses, skirts, hosiery, underthings, blouses. Ah, so sweet and warming, light and soft and silky. I have a few silk things, not quite what I deem as what I really need though. The few things are better than none though.

Wool can be itchy, so silk underneath and wool overtop are nice mates.

So in summer-time lighter clothing can be worn, barefoot-ness in the house and yard is nice, but I don’t like the overall heat of the days, and the whole thing gets old after awhile. The cold of Autumn and Winter can be drudgery when it comes to putting on the clothes needed to outdoors, and to keep warm in a colder house if you have one (as we do). But it’s aliveness, it’s senses undulled, not dulled at all, so very brimming with life and energy. It’s the intellect sparking. That’s what it is. That’s why I like the colder weather so much, I guess. It IS because I like the cool, I respond well to it, but it’s the underlying how real do I feel, the real me, my mind … Ah yes, the cold is my friend, it aides the real me in appearing.

As long as the conditions are right.

What can dull me during winter … buildings with artificial heat. Like at church. In some stores. In some peoples cars. In some peoples houses.

What happens to me is: my sinuses close up, gooky or dry and I can’t barely breath, all the while that is happening I yawn and start getting sleepier and sleepier and sleepier … it’s my mind, it sinks far away into the depths of the folds of oblivion. lolling tongue feeling.

Give me the freezing air, let me wear the light warm clothing to keep my body warm enough and give me that cool to cold air to breathe… it is full of life, and the heated air feels nearly depleted of oxygen.

Falsely cooled (A/C) buildings seem devoid of air unless the system is moving air all of the time.

What it feels to me like is slow suffocation.

I have no such problem with my house in the winter. In the old days we had a heat pump and it couldn’t keep our house warm … good job it did. It’s a gentler heat and less stuffy even if it does warm up the house, but it’s still better all around for the air to be natural as possible … we don’t use that now, it broke. The fireplace we use, it makes a nice heat that is natural and doesn’t fill up even one room, but takes the edge of cold off nicely. The air is full of breathability. :) With the heatpump we used the fireplace before, so the heatpump not being used is only the corners of the house that are left without help … and an electric space heater here and there help out when it worse out (like the days of low 30′s or 20′s and no sun for days and day [2 or more]). I like it when it snows or ices over. Everything stops and it gets warmer in the house. I mean, there’s no going anywhere, no one out there moving about, and the house gets warmer from the insulation of the whole region from snow or ice.

We live in Georgia, so it’s not a whole season of snow and ice, but fits and starts of it, then it goes away and mild cold days reign again, till another ice storm comes. We get cold weather in October sometimes, but mostly it awaits November, and we sometimes get some flurries or snow before the end of the year. It’s usually January though, mid or later, when the weather gets seriously icy or snowy. Last year it wasn’t until February. Overall last year was a very mild winter for us.

I’m just thrilled that the weather has changed finally. The trees that still have leaves (some dropped them or part of them in September, curiously) are beginning to really start to show colours changing. Peak colour is usually mid-November. Right on schedule now.

My hens are mostly all molting again. They were laying great just a few weeks ago, then suddenly dropped to only one hen laying, then she quit after a week or so of solo laying. Then about a week ago Hawklady started to lay every other day and a few days in a row as well, with nothing today, but yesterday and the day before, yes. (she’s still in her own little overturned basket area.)

The Leghorns have a flood of white fluff in their pen. The other hens have a sea of mostly black and a little bit of brown fluff all about them (Autralorps and Golden-laced Wyandottes)

I still want to get a pen made for just the Wyandottes and Hawklady, that’d be three of them. It seems nice to segregate them, they tend towards self looking behaviour. Really they do, in my backyard at least.

So it’s colder time and the Leghorns are now sleeping in their laying box, you can tell from all the feather and poop in their every morning. No more eggs being layed, so go for it ladies. Seven of them crammed in that there box.

So then, this weather, it’s bright and fluffy stuff, envigoration-ating. So what nice when it gets cooler, and darker sooner, but some good old-fashion spooky reading … and nothing like hearing it read to you.

This is the audio book I got today: Great Classic Hauntings: Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson and a couple more.

They are having a sale there on Audible.com, 50% off of many books, not all, just many. Each on-sale item has an orange pumpkin next to it. The book I got was a lower priced book and exactly what I had in mind to get, a selection of something, including Poe, but not limited to him, though I’m interested in getting more Poe-only audio books in the future.

So the days are less light, well, very light and bright indeed, but less of it time-wise. This next weekend is when the clocks change for us from EDT to EST. Then it’ll be darker earlier in the evening. It has seemed like the last month the light has gone noticeably earlier, so that the time change will make it shockingly earlier. It’s mostly the lack of light we have in the house due to removing our deck French doors this year. It darkened things up intensely. We had a window A/C unit in over the sink and just took that out today, so now we have a smidgen more light in here again. (House back faces South) It’ll be interesting to see how it feels, light-wise, in here after a few more days of a window view there again, before the Fall Backwards-ness of time on Sunday early AM.

Biblical Christianity and Catastrophes

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Bret McAtee has a great post about the New Orleans situation and Biblical Christianity.

If y’all have read my earlier Hurricane Katrina posts, you might know that I have heard the “cess pool” term used in description of New Orleans, physically, on TWC and remarked at how that is a spiritually fitting term, also I have spoken of the temporal situation of this situation and that the soul is what matters here, not the stuff. It all goes to what Bret writes on the Backwater Report.

Note: Bret also has this posted on his site “acidink”.

Katrina’s Tail End

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We are still under Tornado Watch and possible flash flood watch … but that seems to be one that affects those more by creeks and rivers, pond, streams, lakes, etc. We don’t have one that close. It’s not that we won’t ever be flooded, but it’s less likely where we are. We have had lots of rain this summer, we are quite filled up, so just a little extra rain can cause low level flooding, soppy yards, etc.

Last night it rained fairly steady and harder for awhile. I had to put towels around the bedroom A/C unit, water was leaking in pretty fast at times. Just the side-ways tropical rain. So often tropical storms around here do there deed at nighttime. Daylight rain was light. The sounds of the rain were light. Darkness fell, bigger storms rolled through and over us and flashed and banged, but little rain more than the light stuff fell. It wasn’t until after 11pm that the bigger rain came.

The yard this morning was wet, soggy but not soppy wet like some of the 2004 storms produced for us. But I will say that this storm, Katrina, afforded us more excitement overall. Little wind. Little rain, but great thunderous flashyness. I am comparing this all to the 2004 storms and how they acted over us. They dumped rain. Very few crackly fireworks if any. Katrina is definitely fiestier, fiesiest. Yes it did rain, indeed it did, but not in comparision to the rains of 2004 hurricane/tropical-degrades.

All the stories coming out of the sticken areas of The South are so sad. There is one that is the saddest. The older black man who lost his wife in the flood waters, their house split apart, they climbed to the roof and she couldn’t hold on, she said something like “I can’t hold on, take care of the children and grandchildren”. They haven’t found her yet. (I haven’t searched the net for this story, I heard it on TWC, interview with the man, Mr. Jackson in Biloxi, MS.)

That’s just one story out there. Cell phones are all out of service, other utilities are out. So information is sketchy to get at. This is an example of what techonology is: sensitive and not anything to be relied upon. :rolleyes:

I heard one TvCaster on TWC refer to New Orleans as “a cesspool” …hmmmm. maybe so, maybe it has been for awhile (please understand I speak of protestant faith issues! and the TWC was speaking to the water issues from broken levees and all the mess going on there.)

Well the weather today is: Clouds that are low and gray to black racing from the sw to the ne sort of. Breezes that are heavier than a “normal” day to light gustiness (which is delightful). The sun is out behind the clouds and peeks through now and then. Ah, that’s the power source for the tropical moisture to flare up into tornadical behaviour.

So the skies lightened at sunrise, and since then get darker, then lighter, darker, darker, lighter, darker … as the last fringes of Katrina stream overhead to the NE.

A Tribute to Katrina

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I made up a new poem-ic phrase while IM’ing with Frankie last night:

Rumble, rumble, boil and crumble.

You know — the witchy brew chanting of literary edges … it’s a play on that. Offshoot tornadoes, awesome power in storms such as Katrina.

If you watch the news [about Katrina] you’ll see some things from Georgia, perhaps. Roofs gone, buildings crushed, fear struck into the hearts of many. Worse stories are starting to filter out of the coastal Gulf area.

God is so very powerful. So very much The Creator of all things wondrous. Storms like Katrina are a testimony to God’s power. Atheisticly minded folks won’t think so, but that doesn’t make it not true. Katrina was a massive Cat 5 hurricane as she steered towards the coastal area of the Gulf of Mexico. She slowly degraded, and is now a Tropical Storm, but something to watch out for still. She’s still a powerful Trop. Storm. She’s holding on.

Floods, mud, houses falling apart, tornadoes spawning off and ripping of rooves … it will continue today and Katrina’s remnants will meet up with another flow in the NE to dump upon the already wet and being rained on NE.

May God be Praised.

Turn your heart to God, let Him heal your wounds. Rebuilding, moving away to somewhere else, mourning losses, these things are temporal. The soul is not.

Under Tornado Warnings

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We are under particular Tornado Warnings/Watches this evening. Just a while ago, oh about an hour ago already, I heard a bunch of rumblings to the South, and sure enough it was dark out that way, and lighting could be seen cloud to cloud. It then started to be the more dangerous type, ground to cloud. So I looked online and found there and on TV as well that Walton county had Tornado Warning on, and there was an immensely red and yellow cell from the most outer feeder band of Katrina there … and that county is not far away, in fact just below us.

Lightening action was intense for awhile, then seemed to pass by to the North. The TV radar is still showing very active cells below us though. So we’ll see what happens locally IRL. I turned the computer off and the network and phone stuff for awhile, but turned it on again to see what’s happening and to post this.

Frank is in Florida and can’t call me anyhow, so I wanted to get this online so he might see it. Our phone service is not working. DSL is though. We have vonage through DSL too, but that’s not working either. We only have one phone, so I can’t tell what’s up. Well, actually we do have another, the fax machine. I just went down and plugged it in, but it gives me the same “open” connection sound. I haven’t tried it in another jack, all jacks are connected daisy-chained anyhow. It’s weird though, that the modem can connect to the internet via the phone jack, but that vonage box isn’t connecting to vonage and neither is dial tone for local service that the DSL is through. Weird, weird, weird. It all started sometime this afternoon, I’m not sure when, there was no lightening around at all then.

The rain has been light since it started when I last posted. Steady at times, but never heavy. Just a light tropical rain. Before all the lightening was getting intense I was out looking at the clouds in the front of the house and had my camera, snapping a few things, and a Ruby-Throat Hummingbird came by. So I went in and made up some sugar water for them and filled the one feeder I have out there. I had filled it last week, but never saw them drink from it. I saw a hummer and so did Frank, but never did we see it feed. The feeder dripped dry. So I watched tonight after I put it out and there were two hummers that came back and were playing and flew to the feeder many times, back and forth here and there in the trees, across the street, zipping back and forth between all these and other things.

I got a few pictures, but they were blurry, and then I might have gotten a few better ones with the Hosta’s, but I have to check that out still. My hostas have some that bloom earlier and some that bloom later. The white blossoms are out now. The hummers fed on a few and that’s the time I snapped what might be croppable to blow up a bit.

It was lightly raining at that time, a time that hummers love to play in, I’ve noticed in past years. This is the first interaction I’ve had with hummers in a long time. Last year wasn’t heavy hummer time for us, and this year not at all until today. It was refreshing to see the hummers play in front of me. :)

The lightening we had was refreshing too. Many cracks and booms and rumbles, and daggers and forks of lightening. Ah!

So being under Tornado Warnings is about actual spotted Tornadoes tonight, as well as weather being primed massively by the tropical system to just expect sudden tornadoes in the weather, often maybe diguised in heavy rain and not noticeable until it’s too late if you aren’t in a safe spot … then you are toast. So of course I was out on the porch watching. I wasn’t standing in the open, but I guess it’s a spot that’s not recommended in any case. I saw nothing but nice clouds, gentle rain, and massive lightinging here and there. There were notices on TV of spotted tornadoes, but in directions not exactly affecting us, so I was just watching carefully, enjoying the weather phenoms.

I’ll have some photos to post later, if any of the hummers or night cloud photos turned out.