"We're not dead yet:

video and breathless warnings of possible disaster every fifteen minutesfilm at ten."

When we last took note of the dire warnings of mayhem, we had been told to expect freezing rain from sometime around noon today until Sunday with brief breaks, total accumulations across the area of one to as much as two inches; temps in the mid-to-low thirties this morning and dropping through the day. When I got up about 0730, it was about 25 and spitting freezing rain. By the time I was getting to work around 0900 it was sleeting only. Which continued all through the day.

Which caused me to wonder if the weather weenies ever look out the bloody window, because they kept reporting 'light freezing rain'. Which it did in some areas, but not through here where they kept calling it 'rain' even though it was little ice balls falling from the sky.

Speaking of weather weenies and related jackassesspecies, on KTOK radio yesterday evening one guy kept running an intro about "Preparing for the black death", sound effects and all, which he explained meant 'the ice will kill all the power and we're all gonna die in the dark'. Laughing the time, of course. Now, I have a sense of humor that can laugh at most things; it has been referred to as 'somewhat twisted' a time or two by unkind people; but when you're doing shit like that while people are being told to prepare for the worst, ain't too damn funny to me. I don't know if someone told him to knock it off or it got old to him, but about the time I was wondering about loading a rifle and looking for a line of sight to their office he stopped it. Maybe telepathy works.

I think what happened is the colder air came in faster than expected, so instead of the snow melting in the layer of warm air above and making it to the ground as liquid- thus turning the area into a giant skating rink and breaking trees- it melted in the(maybe thinner, too) warm layer and then froze into sleet. Which is fine. Sleet is a difficulty but not nearly on the scale of the alternative.

So we'll see what happens tomorrow into Sunday. Hopefully more of the same since the temperature is expected to remain almost constant at 20-24 here through then. Currently they're expecting skies to clear Sunday night, which means cold as hell the next couple of days before it starts warming up a bit.

This time of year can be strange in Oklahoma. Usually the coldest weather tends to be late December to mid-January, with the worst of snow and/or ice January to early February. Usually. There is not hard & fast rule about it. We've had heavy snow in December and little the rest of the winter, and damn cold late January-early February. Which led to a discussion with a friend one time of how some of the pagan holidays from Britain don't work the same here. Imbolc(generally Feb. 2) traditionally marks the 'first stirrings of life in the earth', which sounds nice. Except it's early January and I had to mow part of the back yard two days ago; it's not unusual to have patches of green grass throughout the winter, so the life in the earth sometimes never stops stirring. Which leads to starting the mower in January(thank you, Sta-Bil).

I'll ask you to excuse me now, I need to process the brass from the range the other day and see if I have time to replace the shotshells I fired.