mattie g

I picked up a pretty standard feeder last year and put it near our landscaped pond area. Plenty of hummingbirds showed up within a few weeks of putting it up, even with having done so relatively late in the spring. The funny thing to watch was when we would get 3, 4, 5 hummingbirds at once. At first, I thought it was awesome that I'd get to to see multiple of them at once on a regular basis, but I never realized how territorial they are until I saw the scraps that took place over that feeder.

Not looking good, I assume.

Sowed my first seeds of the season today. Four varieties of tomatoes, one of jalapeños, and two of basil. All are under grow lights and on heat mats in the basement, and should be sitting at 75-80F or so on those mats. I debated some other herbs - particularly parsley and cilantro - but held off for now. Cilantro is odd to grow (but I LOVE it), so I might just sprinkle some throughout the garden during the season, but I have found that parsley can rally thrive if you transplant it correctly.

I was about to suggest Lira, but you beat me to it.

One of my best friends had Stage 3 colon cancer at 26. He had been slightly symptomatic since college, and it was only his wife's intervention (newly married) that forced him to get checked out. He ended up having a colectomy, and <knock on wood> he's luckily been free of cancer since. Crazy...a 26-year-old having colon cancer. I remember hearing that his doctor had recently (at that time) been seeing quite an uptick in colon cancer diagnoses among younger men. Not cool at all.

Cool stuff. That EPO ridge is kind of sneaking into the western NAO domain, as well, and the Scandinavian Ridge and EPO ridge are threatening to pinch off the TPV altogether. It's certainly a +NAO on the matrix, but that's just semantics because it absolutely works for us.

I haven't been paying attention to the forecasts recently other than that it was supposed to get mild late this week, so I was shocked at how mild it was when I took the elder daughter to the bus stop this morning!

Urgh. That sucks. Hopefully it just stays mild and that all are on the mend soon. We know quite a few fully vaccinated and boosted folks who have gotten it, but each one of them had pretty mild symptoms, the worst of which was a bad cold for a couple days. Obviously that's not how it goes for everyone, but my anecdotal evidence is that that's very much how it's been going in general.

So you're saying it's not going to snow?

I'm no expert, but that EPO ridge is delivering cold directly from the Arctic, and that TPV near Greenland is serving as a kind of confluential [made up word] block. Looks like there might be a hint of split flow, too, so there would be good moisture coming in from the southwest up into that cold, and since we have the confluence over the Northeast, disturbances would be unlikely to cut.

Here's my issue...you're exhausting. That's my brutally honest take, so I do kind of apologize if it comes off as dick-ish. It honestly doesn't feel like you actually listen to and process what people tell you. You bring up the same things over and over again, and in much the same fashion (e.g., "Nina! Oh...woe is me! All no-snow problems are because of the Nina!"), and no matter how many people try to answer your questions, give you good info, or talk you down from the ledge, you still come back to the same things time and time again.

It rains or freezing rains in far NW South Carolina from hours 246 to 348. Makes sense.

I think DC itself struggled, but plenty of us just north and west had a decent month. Edit: What WxUSAF said.

I'm honestly surprised there haven't been any "confused" reactions to this yet since the map has yellow/orange over us. That said...those two H5 anomaly maps are astonishingly carbon copy-ish looks.

Weather Will said that we were done for the season though.

11/30: T 12/8: T 1/3: 9.25" 1/7: 2.75" 1/16: 3.00" 1/20: T 1/28: 1.00" 2/13: 0.25" Total as of 2/14: 16.25"

I haven't seen Wheel of Time, but I can't imagine they wouldn't be laser focused on making this right. Not only are they sinking a ton of money into it, but they're also taking on the rich tapestry of Tolkien's world, with the legions of fans - anything from true Tolkien geeks to relative fans of the movies only - that will be watching with extreme caution. If WingNut, et al hadn't screwed up The Hobbit so badly (though the first movie was quite good), then I think the scrutiny might be slightly less than it otherwise would have been. LOTR is just so much to live up to, so I hope they can give this the justice it deserves. I'm going to go into it with tempered enthusiasm, but if they can figure out how to truly transmit to the screen what was in some of Tolkien's books and notes on the Second Age, then it's going to be incredible.

My allergies kick in when the maples start to bud, so I'm expecting to start itching after the second or third real warm up we get. I usually don't have any issues beyond the early season, so even though I have a rough 4-6 weeks, I consider myself lucky. I've considered getting tested for my allergies with a shot to follow, but I'm not sure if it's 100% necessary.

That's our "severe" every year!

Woke up to bare ground. Pretty sweet!

The best thing to come out of the game (which I didn't watch )last night:

The maybe 0.25” I got this morning has been vaporized. Pixie flakes barely make the trek through the lower atmosphere without being nuked by the filtered mid-February sun, and if they do they last no more than 10 seconds on the grass.

White rain…oh how I’ve (not) missed you.

That’s a good call. Our big front porch addition started in April last year, so we really couldn’t do much in the front, and then we transplanted a bunch of stuff from the front to the back while we waited for new landscaping in the front. Hoping we can get started nice and early this year. Your idea of getting the mulch down early sounds like a great place to begin.

Sorry you missed out on your big dog. Hope you can get over your annoyance and disappointment.