Category Archives: weather

Wind, Wind, and More Wind

The wind has been blowing for the last several days here. It has everyone on edge as the howl and gusting is continuous. It even drove the number of calls to the Humane Society to record levels as dogs and cats took to any shelter from the wind. Add to that the fact that the wind was mixed with periodic downpours and a spot of hail and we have had what I like to call a spa treatment weekend: a derm-abrasion via blowing sand, a mud pack due to the rain and flying dirt, and finally a poor man’s Swedish massage from the pounding hail. Best of all: no reservation or payment required.

Today the wind finally knocked the basketball hoop head over heels and sent the garbage can and garden carts flying too.

Here’s hoping the wind and continued low pressure will abate soon. (Low pressure makes me ache in every joint. Not just me, but I am naturally more attuned to my joints. {*grin*})

(A completely extraneous aside: I just found a huge fly in my coffee. Yuk! Nothing like drowned fly flavoring to make one sprint to spit out the coffee and the corpse of the fly.)

I’ll leave you with an ingenious method to avoid putting laundry away, especially if your spouse is at all picky. It is somewhat akin to the prohibition against me washing L’s colored laundry. {*grin*}

A Little Post About Nothing

I must be turning into a curmudgeon. Why you ask? Because I couldn’t get enthused by any of Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge topics this week. At least not enthused enough to write on any of them. It isn’t as if they weren’t good topics, I just couldn’t sink my writing teeth into them. Oh well.



Today was indeed cool (in fact it is a glorious 28 degrees as I write), but the forecast snow missed us. We settled for rain and freezing temperatures. I find it wryly ironic that I spend so much time waiting for the warmer weather and then a long time wishing it would cool off again. So I have no real right to be dismayed when spring is a fleeting phenomena; I know it will be hotter than I desire soon enough. Guess I should just settle back and enjoy the drear.


Blogger seems to be having issues tonight, so no pictures or images or deep content tonight. Is it just me or has blogger become a bit less reliable of late? Especially the image functions.


Back to the salt mines.

Oddities of an evening

It’s cold and windy and raining outside and here I am inside with a soaked dog. There is nothing like having a soaked long-haired dog like Molly wanting to lay her dripping muzzle in your lap. What more could a man ask for?

(Tagged art courtesy of Banksy.)
Aside from the damp dog and weather, all is copacetic. {*grin*}
Fitting with the mood of the evening, I present five odd facts for your edification:
  • The symbol above the 3 key (#) is an octothrope. Contrary to all the masses who incorrectly call it the pound sign or number sign.
  • The eye of an ostrich is bigger than its brain.
  • A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. Thus all of you who post on a certain service featuring a blue bird logo and 140 character limits are abusing pregnant goldfish.
  • Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
  • A quarter has 119 groves around its edge.
So what strikes you as odd today?

A Rambling Post to Prevent Three Short Ones

Earlier in the week, I got a phone call out of the blue from someone I hadn’t spoken to or thought of since high school some 38 years ago. It took me a moment to get over the shock, but then we visited for a bit and he got around to the real point of the call – he was trying to locate a mutual third acquaintance from high school since he had decided to resume an earlier career in photography and the mutual friend was a professional photographer and cameraman. I had to disappoint and tell him that the last time I had visited with our mutual acquaintance was 20 years ago. At that time he was a camera man for CNN and we were both based in LA, but I hadn’t heard much from him since leaving LA.

Saturday was the mother-daughter lunch at the church, so L and MIL had a good time here while I toiled away getting the packets for tonight’s board meeting done. Then in the afternoon our friend came over to visit and them take us out to supper. G, the friend, was in town for the sad task of assisting his brother and sister arrange hospice care for their mother. It is sad; their mother has reached the point where she recognizes none of the kids and is in that petulant imaginary baby stage of advanced dementia. G and I have known and hung out with each other since grade school, more than 45 years ago. So we know each others moms well – we spent many a supper eating at each others house and driving G’s older sister crazy as kids. Now we have both lost our fathers and are a part of what my cohort calls the fatherless generation since we are at the age where most of our fathers are gone. Before too long we will become the parent-less generation as our mothers reach that event horizon. It is sad to contemplate.

Anyway, G and L and I spent the time visiting and enjoying catching up with each other. G lives in the south now, working as an engineer. We see each other once or twice a year. His older brother retired from the IRS and moved back here to the childhood home several years ago and his sister has lived here all her life, so in addition to visiting his mom, he comes back to see his siblings and along the way we get a chance to visit. It is amusing how clearly I remember our first meeting in fifth grade – I still see that same youngster in my minds eye when I think of G – even though we are now both grizzled oldsters with white beards and a lot less hair. And we still  remember doing stupid things together back then that would result in long-term hospitalization now. It’s always good to be reminded of the time when you were fearless and invincible. {*grin*} Heck, G was my wingman and chauffeur the night L and I first went out and he was a groomsman in our wedding. He just can’t escape us!

For Mother’s Day, we had both mom and MIL over for lunch. The day was beautiful, in the 70’s and calm. So after the guests departed home, L and I and Molly went for walk in the park followed by a relaxing nap (See, I told you we were oldsters!). In any case, as the evening wore on, the winds came up and blew hard enough to move the patio furniture about and knock over the basketball hoop, etc. Generally a miserably windy evening with the howling and rattling windows. Made L grouchy and Molly needy. What a combo.

This morning the wind was gone, but L and Molly had to squeeze out the back door to move the furniture out of the way so they could fully open the door. I got the task of setting the basketball hoop back up since L cannot lift it. And of course we had to clean up the bird nests and eggs and little hatchlings blown out of th trees and killed by the wind. The wind made me curious so I looked at the weather forecast for the week. Wednesday is forecast to reach a high in the low 40s and snow! So much for spring. Of course it is supposed to be back into the mid-70s by Saturday. I just love Colorado weather!

Enough for now. Time to enjoy the grey drear before it starts heading for the cold and rain and snow.

Experimental Cooking

Today was dull and dreary; overcast skies and alternating rain and thunderstorms most of the day. Molly wasn’t willing to get more than a few inches from me all day. Finally this evening with the storms passed she was willing to leave my side long enough to venture outside for a bit. What is it going to be like this summer when the real thunderstorms arrive?

I had supper at mom’s tonight and the discussion turned to the ingredients in microwave mashed potatoes. We conducted a side by side taste test of two different brands because the advertised differences were amusing. One brand (Betty Crocker) advertised “high fiber” and had a larger serving size (2/3 cup) with fewer calories, the other (Idahoan) was advertised as “natural” potatoes with a smaller serving size (1/2 cup). (Both were red potato varieties.) The results: we preferred the Idahoan natural potato kind. It tasted more like real mashed potatoes and had a better consistency.

I had predicted the result before the experiment based on the ingredients listed on the box. The Betty Crocker “high fiber” variant had cellulose listed as the second ingredient. They were using cellulose to supply fiber and add body to the potatoes, allowing the lower calorie claim along with the larger serving size. But it also made the consistency stiffer and the taste was less potato-ey than real mashed potatoes. It is amusing what you can learn if you read the box carefully.

That experiment in turn led to a discussion of angel food cake baking.  I had made a regular angel food cake earlier in the week and mom had made the chocolate variant yesterday. I happened to mention that the boxed mix I used allowed adding either a quarter cup of all purpose flour or a quarter cup of cocoa and extending the baking time by 3 minutes to account for the altitude here. Mom had started from a different mix but had added the cocoa as a seat of the pants thing. Both turned out well, but the high altitude “fixes” led to us looking at a couple of the “from scratch” recipes renowned in the local area and comparing them to a recipe out of a standard cook book. Sure enough, the local recipes had that dash more flour added relative to the standard cookbook.

 
I wonder how many local recipes have all the altitude corrections built in without notation? I also wonder how drastic the effects would be on low altitude cooking.

Enough blithering about cooking, time to do some real work.