rain

It's Monday. The housework was done, for the most part, yesterday. Outside issues command attention. But it is raining again, so at least one thing has been postponed: Lisa and her mom were going to go somewhere today, but her mom called to cancel.

"I'm not going out in this weather, and I don't suppose that Lisa ought to either," she said when she called. Yeah. Lisa is feeling much better but it would be foolish to tempt the fates.

Saturday night I was pretty sick; on Sunday morning I slept until 11 AM. Wow. That hasn't happened in a long time. And when I did get up, I saw Lisa, looking very nice, in the kitchen finishing up the dishes. That's unusual too, but she was finally feeling better after more than a week of feeling wiped out by a cold.

My immune system is pretty hardy; debilitating symptoms are rare for me. Plus I'm too hyperactive to lay in bed unless I am very ill.

Even now, since starting to write this short piece, I've let the cat out and back in again, made coffee, looked up something about Linux (something obscure that has nothing to do with anything else I'm doing right now) in a text that is sitting beside me, and played Joan Osborne's "What If God Was One Of Us" on my guitar. And BBC World News is playing on my PC.

The troublesome cold symptoms from the last two days are mostly gone. A little chest congestion, a bit of sinus pressure; nothing that cannot be alleviated to some degree by over-the-counter medicines.

My first snowman at Château Cruso

The rain, though - heavy drops splatting against the windows. In late January. This is not really a "January thaw," although the ground had been frozen for a while. The season has been unseasonably warm.

 The year started out well enough, winter-wise. There was enough snow for me to make a small (10" or so tall) snowman. Doesn't he look happy? He only survived a few days, though.

But it could be worse. We could be having a drought. Haywood County, where we live, does not have any water coming in from surrounding counties. We are near the top of the southern ridge, so without adequate precipitation we'd have a dry well.