What a difference a few days makes

This is what things looked like Monday morning:



Just for grins, I tried the PhotoStitch software that came with my camera and it did a fairly good job of relieving me of the grunt work. I had to pull it into Photoslobber to scale the thing down, though (it was like 7000 pixels wide!).

We somehow ended up in a sort of warm slot during the Sunday snow — it stuck north, south, and east of us, but here it was melt-on-contact. Atlanta got a fair amount of snow, but here the kids were disappointed to see the ground clear and the school bus rolling in right on schedule.

Today, it’s sunny and 70, so I grabbed the camera and took a walk I’ll be posting shots in random order, on and off this week, as I think about it. Here’s two to get started. As always, click for a larger picture or hover for a little extra commentary.

Daffodils out front of the manor. There are several stands scattered around the place. I like ’em because they don’t need much attention and just do their thing as early as they can get away with.

As you will see later on, yellow seems to be the predominant color for early bloomers around here.

The lettuce and spinach are sprouting! I have them sitting out on top of the cold frame; they won’t get overcooked that way and they’ll likely get some rain through the week. The onions are taking a little longer, but I dug up the big one out back — turned out to be eight onions growing together — and separated them into a bed out front. They happily established themselves through the winter.

I’m also planning on sowing some seeds, maybe this weekend, out back. I’ve been assured that the deer would chow down on anything I plant in the garden area out back… maybe I need some fence. I guess I'll stake out a couple of rows in the back where the kitchen water drains and go from there — not a lot of afternoon sun, but for cool-weather crops that might be a good thing.

Don’t forget to spring forward tomorrow… and a new FAR Future sub-series kicks off here Monday.

Spring #3 Comes In Like a… Wildcat? a Bird?

This is one way to visualize spring #3 on Planet Georgia:



The real spring is on the way, the one that all too quickly turns into summer. You know this by the birds you have to chase out of your garage:



Of course, being a thrasher, it’s a contrary little SOB. Even with the garage door wide open, we couldn’t get it to leave. I’ll try again in the morning… and it will leave even if I have to toss its mangled corpse out myself. It’s not going to nest in there and crap all over my car.

Because my car already has enough crap all over it… and it’s sad:



Meanwhile, things have gotten ever so slightly dangerous out there on the grounds of the free-range insane asylum. It seems that a cougar (and not the kind you drive or buy a drink) or other large cat has wandered into the area and has decided it really likes to snack on horses. Big V had a horse killed night before last, and another nearby farm has also lost a horse. There’s some speculation that it might be an escapee from a nearby sanctuary, since it doesn’t seem to bother cows too much. Not that the cows can relax… there are coyotes after them. A young guy helping Mrs. Fetched sighted some today, and wasn’t happy about it.

It would be nice if the wildcat came and ate the stupid bird, then ran off the coyotes before finding its way back home. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

An Open Letter

From: FARfetched
To: “Climate change skeptics” and other Global Warming deniers

Undoubtedly, many of you have been strangely warmed by the first Alberta Clipper to come south in about five years. Those video clips of snowbound New Englanders and Chicagoans, even if you’re one of them, have given you that warm fuzzy feeling of vindication… here’s your “proof” that you know better than those intellectuals — what do they know? After all, they’ve only spent their entire careers studying the incredibly complex system we call the Earth’s climate.

Well, here’s a news flash for you, Bubba… have you checked the calendar lately? This is the season known (in the Northern Hemisphere anyway) as “winter.” The birds fly south to warmer climes, snow falls in the north, people put away their boats and get out their skis? Remember? It’s cold because it gets cold this time of year. Do you really think that global warming means palm trees will start growing along Buffalo’s Lake Erie waterfront? Don’t be silly.

Winters are a lot less harsh than they used to be, not only in my lifetime but since I moved to Planet Georgia in 1982. Back then, hard cold snaps like this were a yearly occurrence, and below-zero (F) temperatures something you’d see roughly every other year. Not any more — the weather dudes tell us our single-digit temps are the first in 5 years, and we haven’t seen below-zero weather for 10 to 15 years. In Michigan, people now complain bitterly about large amounts of cold and snow that were commonplace when I was a kid.

Don’t take my word for it, look at what’s been happening to global temperatures over the last 160 years or so:



Sure, there are blips either way, but since the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear the trend has been up. This year might be a blip down, maybe not. I noted last year that August was a lot more pleasant than usual; only the first few days were over 90F here.

There’s also that little minor detail about the Arctic ice cap, and how it seems to be getting smaller nearly every year. By the way, the chart above depicts average temperature rises; the Arctic is warming much faster than… say, the southeastern US.

So enjoy your shot of cold weather; it will be gone in a few days. I know I enjoyed a milder than usual August last year; if a few days of bug-killing cold is the price to pay for that, I’ll pay it. None of us know exactly what the weather is going to bring us in two weeks, let alone a month; the farther out we go, the more we have to rely on trends (which suggest warming overall) and computer models (ditto). But I do know that we’ll all be bitching about how hot it is in 6 months or so.

Cloudy days

Spring #2 is winding down, with Winter #3 set to arrive Sunday or Monday. It has been rainy except when it was relatively cold. Yeah, the sun comes out and it gets cold. Even the weather is psychotic on Planet Georgia.



This was hanging over my head yesterday morning on the way to work. A little blue sky poked through here and there, but mostly it was dark and threatening. I thought I’d get to that lighter edge, or even past it, but it was either moving in the same direction (things were moving quickly yesterday) or was farther away than it appeared.

Christmas Eve

More rain, and even a thunderstorm a couple hours ago. I don’t remember ever having to yank the DSL on Christmas Eve… but on Planet Georgia, even the weather is a little neurotic. Winter #2, as I expected, is over after two days; Spring #2 is drooling all over us again. But if I bundle up, it looks like I might be able to ride the motorcycle to work Monday & Tuesday mornings (and then we’ll be out the rest of the week… too bad all work-weeks can’t be two days long).

We spent much of yesterday afternoon cutting and splitting wood, then stacking it behind the manor. The pile is fully replenished, and should last us a month if we don’t cut more sooner… we probably will though.

Daughter Dearest’s boyfriend Sasquatch (yup, it’s official… they’ve been “dating” since October but waited to tell us although we expected it anyway) has been spending a lot of time here. When he’s been gone, DD has been with him. I’m OK with it, and Mrs. Fetched seems to be. He’s somewhat transportation-limited, but he got over to the college once or twice somehow. I suspect that she gave him mono, but it didn’t hit him nearly as hard as it did her. But both of them are pretty much over it & (at least to me) are highly entertaining to have around.

Today was much less strenuous… A package from Mom arrived (which I’ll open tomorrow) and I took Jam down to Woodstock so she could pick up her car. She, Brand X, and Evil Lad NOT are headed north, into some much colder weather than we’ve had here at all. So is DoubleRed, although she’s going elsewhere.

Maybe the kitten can wait up for Santa, but I’m pooped regardless. See you in the morning.

The 12 Seasons of Planet Georgia

Friends and relatives back in Michigan sometimes ask me how I deal with the weather here — “at least we get four seasons here," is one common refrain. I reply that on Planet Georgia, we have 12 seasons: summer, fall, winter, spring, winter, spring, winter, spring, winter, spring, winter, spring.

Winter #1 was fairly long, spanning much of November into the first third of December before it reluctantly started warming up a little. This week has been Spring #1, warm, wet, and smelling like spring; we let the firebox go out some time this week and I shoveled out a good-sized bucket of ash this afternoon. The forecasters have had a heck of a time with this system; the rain has stayed on much longer than anyone expected. Lord knows we need the rain, but it’s starting to get to the point where people are complaining about it. But when it’s not raining, I’ve been wandering around outside without a jacket and not missing it and driving with the windows down. As long as the rain hangs on, though, it will not be cold. But…

The meteorologists have been waiting for a cold front to sag south and bring us Winter #2. It looks like that will finally happen late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, just in time for the solstice, and it’s supposed to be 18°F Monday morning — which, of course, is when Mrs. Fetched gets her chickens again. But if the extended forecast has any credence, it will only get below freezing for two nights.

As for today, we spent some of the morning at a video shoot — for a poultry processing company, of all things — and the afternoon Christmas shopping.

Lunar Eclipse [UPDATED]

Of course it would be a cloudy night,
with a lunar eclipse happening tonight!

This was the best I could do. I had better (less) cloud cover earlier, but all I had then was my cellphone and that didn't work so good.


UPDATE: About an hour and a half later, just past totality, it cleared up and I got another shot that I didn't have to fight the clouds for.

Snow Day

You know you’re in the South when the forecast includes an inch of snow and it’s the Top Story in the media.

I grabbed a treadmill in the workout room at the office late in the afternoon; I came back to people lined up along the windows. They had roped off half the parking lot along the side of the building today, so I figured they were doing something interesting with a crane. Seeing nothing like that, I said, “what’s going on?”

“Snow!” one of the gawkers said. Yup. Flake-here-flake-there, but it was snow. The morning forecast said “little or no accumulation,” so I really wasn’t paying much attention. I lived in Michigan the first 22 years of my life, so light flurries were nothing to marvel at.

About 5 o’clock, The Boy called. “It’s snowing pretty heavy out there now. It’s starting to stick to the ground, and it’s blowing around on the roads, too.” I looked out the window again: still light flurries, more than before but nothing to worry about. “OK,” I told him. “Nothing like that here though.”

Not ten seconds after he hung up, Daughter Dearest called. “It’s snowing a lot out here. I’m coming home from [her job]. You need to start coming home.”

“OK, nothing like that here, but I’ll be leaving in ten minutes or so. Just be careful going downhill and over the bridges.”

Five minutes later, Mrs. Fetched: “It’s snowing heavily here. They’re saying we could get six inches. When are you leaving?”

“In a few minutes. I have to do a photo shoot, so I’ll work at home tomorrow anyway.”

So much for “little or no accumulation” — by the time I got to town, snow was sticking to the ground and covered the used car lot. About five miles from home, it started sticking to the road too. A traction check told me there was nothing to worry about… except for the guy in the pickup truck in front of me who slowed to 25 whenever he saw a patch of snow. Sheesh.

So I got home. The Boy had left class a bit later than he should have, so he called about an hour later and said he’d fishtailed outside of town and went back to spend the night with a friend. Mrs. Fetched was, shall we say, less than thrilled.

We didn’t get six inches of snow, but we got an inch & a half. The crazy rhododendron bush has already had a bloom cycle interrupted by a hard freeze; I suppose we’ll be snapping these buds off too. It doesn’t care.

Pre-holiday countdown

Tomorrow is Virtual Friday. One more day, and I’m outta there for what’s left of the year! Hooray! Our department is having a little wing-ding tomorrow after work, which makes it a great day to start the Christmas madness season in earnest.

So I figured I’d bite the bullet. I was wrapping up work, and told Mrs. Fetched, “I’ll be around the whole week. If you need me in the chicken houses, whatever.”

“Daughter Dearest will be off too,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll need you.” Hooray again!

We videotaped DD’s chorus last night, then one of the band moms lined us up to tape the band concert tonight. We didn’t have the ladder last night, so we had to set up the cameras down front… as in, the bare minimum distance where I could zoom out and get the entire choir. The band mom made sure we had the ladder tonight, so we were able to set up on top of the office area (unless someone’s wearing stilts, there’s no way they could walk in front of us up there). After setting up, my phone beeped up a reminder about the Christmas party at the local bike shop. I got an invite, I suppose since I’d bought a bike there this year, and had completely forgotten about it. Mrs. Fetched said, “Go on, I can handle both cameras. For what you spent there, you need to go there.” (Like I didn’t buy one of the lowest-priced road bikes.) But… Hooray Number Three! “Just be back by 7:30 so we can pack up.” Of course, they had a sale going on; gloves were 20% off but I didn’t see a pair that jumped off the rack and promised to keep my hands warm all winter.

I got an unexpected early Christmas gift: The Boy (who has been in & out a lot lately) left a 7oz hip flask in the back of Mrs. Fetched’s car. It didn’t smell at all, but I washed it out anyway then added rum. Of course, nothing comes without a price — he ended up following through on his plan to take the speaker box out of my car, and still hasn’t put the back seat back together. I wanted the extra trunk space anyway, and was thinking about putting a pair of low-profile woofs under the seat. Not like I’m taking the car anywhere right away; the front tires are worn out.

As long as I’m not doing anything else after tomorrow, I’ll be devoting some serious time to writing. I want to put the final tweaks on a short story (The Boy’s) and send it around too. There will be a couple of Christmas parties along the way, just to make things interesting.

3-Day Weekend Update, and Planet Georgia Logic

We (mostly) got our 3-day weekend after all. Mrs. Fetched woke up Saturday morning feeling much better than the day before, and continued to improve through the day. Hooray! Late in the afternoon, we packed a couple of bags with things (and I left the laptop at home, as advised by my good blog-buddies) and headed down. We had a little time to just rest and chill out before going to the company party.

The party went pretty well — I ran into a guy who sits two cubes down from me; he had a short but incredibly cute girlfriend with him. She and Mrs. Fetched hit it off famously, and us guys talked about various things (including shop talk).

A couple of hours into the party, the cellphones started ringing. We had told The Boy that he could have four specific friends over (including Cousin Splat), but no girlfriends or other female types, and nobody was to go into the house without escort. Well, that went by the wayside shortly after we left — there were eight people, two of which were female (one of which was The Boy’s old girlfriend Snippet) — traipsing in and out of the house like they owned the place. Daughter Dearest, who isn’t terribly fond of any of The Boy’s friends, locked the door and The Boy broke the doorknob to get in. Then she got rather upset and yelled at all of them. Cousin Splat lived up to his name by threatening to slap her silly if she didn’t shut up. And that was all she wrote.

Upon arriving at FAR Manor, I immediately told everyone to git. And told Splat that if he ever threatened Daughter Dearest again, there would be Hell to pay. He made some lame excuse, and Mrs. Fetched took over at that point. I started fixing the doorknob — the latch was bent and binding — and The Boy made the mistake of asking me what the big deal was.

“The big deal is,” I told him as he waved his hand at me and walked away, “that your mom and I can’t go anywhere without you ruining it for us!”

“Well, I guess I’m just a big screw-up,” he said, climbing into one of his friends’ cars.

“Yes, yes you are. And if you don’t want to straighten up your act, you’re not welcome back here.” He made the same waving gesture and left. Do I sound like I was peeved? I managed to get the doorknob working and put it back together. It’s a little loose; I guess we need a new one. And deadbolts. FAR Manor is about as secure as a Dozebox. But I digress. All of our stuff was at the hotel room, except for my laptop (which Mrs. Fetched said I should have brought).

Sunday morning, no Boy, and Daughter Dearest pronounced herself fit to solo again. We decided to go ahead and go, told DD to go to the grandparents’ if she didn’t want to stay at the manor, I sighed and grabbed my laptop — Mrs. Fetched didn’t want me to leave it there if The Boy decided to retaliate somehow — and a box of oranges we’d ordered for her older sister, and we took off again. We took a nap through the late afternoon, then decided to resume our original plans to eat at Gimza’s Polish Restaurant in Norcross (the guy whose name is on the sign is a co-worker, doing two jobs and burning the candle at both ends). If you’re in the area, the restaurant is at the corner of Medlock Bridge Rd. and Spalding Drive; the parking lot segues into an adjacent Citgo station. The prices are quite reasonable (much more so than the decor suggests) and the food is very good. Mrs. Fetched, who’s usually fussy about “strange” food, is a fan.

Yesterday (Monday) was our planned shopping day. This worked out. VERY well. We didn’t have the mall to ourselves, but parking was no problem and there were no crowds. We will be doing a Monday shopping trip next year, even if there’s no 3-day weekend to go with it (we may not have another one of those for a long time, or at least until Daughter Dearest is safely in college). We got ahem, cough, and phbhblltt for the kids (neener neener, DD!), and met the sister at a Thai place to transfer the oranges. I was very good; even though I had the computer, I only used it when Mrs. Fetched was watching TV — and then, only to type up stuff I’d written instead of getting online. Much. (She asked me to pull up the weather. Really.)

Speaking of shopping… in one locale, the cops are patrolling mall parking lots and yellow-tagging vehicles that have merchandise visible on seats or floors — “in other words, vehicles that are easy targets for thieves.”

Now that’s Planet Georgia logic for you: find easy targets and make them that much easier to spot! All in the name of fighting crime, of course.

Unintended Captioning

The local Dairy Queen has their Christmas decor up. This window is next to the door, and something about it just didn’t seem right to me.

On the way out, I grabbed my smellphone and took a quick snapshot, while Mrs. Fetched asked me why I was interested in that picture.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “There’s just something a little strange about it.”

I put the picture together with its unintended caption on the way home.

Bon appétit, Santa!

Holiday Music

I did this last year in a podcast, but many of you have started reading this year. So…



Hope you enjoy it! For those of you on dialup, here’s a low-bandwidth version (700K MP3).

De-light-ed

Delighted, that is, that I came home from work yesterday to find FAR Manor all decorated (which means I didn’t have to do it)!

Mrs. Fetched says “we” are not quite done with the lighting (she uses “we” in the same sense as Jim Carrey’s Grinch: “when I say ‘we’ I mean you”), but it sounds like only a couple more strands.




And we must give due credit to The Boy, who did much of the roof work.

The Bottom of the Year

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes. I appreciate each & every one of you.

If I were to design a calendar, it would be circular. The summer solstice would be on top, winter solstice on the bottom. From the top, the calendar would proceed clockwise around summer, fall, winter, and spring. And there would be a chord crossing the circle near the bottom, marking the two months surrounding the winter solstice. For me, this is the bottom of the year: the time of minimum sunlight.

Perhaps the ancients were wise to put major holidays down here in the bottom — merriment, even if forced, takes your mind off the lack of sunlight. In those times when people mostly farmed, they had to be outside whether it was cold and dim or not, so they scheduled many feasts (what I call Eating Season), as the bottom of the year approached and arrived. This was the time to put on weight, and deliberately so: the feasts fattened you up so you had more stored calories to burn through the coming coldest part of the year. Fat is both insulation and fuel.

Other people might strike different chords through different parts of the circle, to represent important times of the year for themselves: farmers would certainly mark times of planting & harvest; tax services would mark February through April (and a secondary mark ending on August 15, when the standard extension expires); retailers would rename Eating Season.

What other important times and seasons “strike a chord” with you?

Ridiculous

Middle of April? check
Planet Georgia? check

Now could someone explain WHY there is SNOW mixed in with the light rain this afternoon?

As if it couldn’t get any worse, my hands smell like a chicken house.

Someone just shoot me.

Good News, Bad News

Bad news first. Things at work have been absolutely crazy the last week or so. Trying to catch up, I brought a couple of projects home with me that are getting down to the wire. I managed to finish the first one this afternoon; trying to decide whether I want to do more than poke at the second one tonight.

The good news is that the documentation projects have rescued me from a weekend of chicken house duty. Given a choice between the two, I’ll take the work work any day.

We have snow flurries outside, and a good fire inside. Stay warm. Family Man, do some extra slacking for me tomorrow….

Abandoned Farmhouse

Abandoned Farmhouse

This long-abandoned homestead caught my eye a couple of weeks ago on a sunny weekend afternoon.

Hello Wet Snowy February

This isn’t the first time a change of month has been somewhat dramatic.

4–5 inches of snow in front of FAR Manor

We were up pretty late last night; some co-workers drove all the way up to FAR Manor to avail themselves of Mrs. Fetched’s video editing services. As always, it took several hours longer than expected; they didn’t get out of here until nearly midnight (and she charges by the hour, cha-ching!). But they were happy, and that’s what counts.

So the weather dudes were predicting possible light icing and up two 2 inches of snow “in the higher elevations.” Oops.

The good part is, we were up so late wrapping up with file conversions that I needed a good excuse to sleep late this morning. Looks like I got it! Unfortunately, I have to get into the office today; I have a critical project that needs finishing and I have to deliver the video files to the co-workers.


I’ll wrap this up with some more snow…

More snow

A second picture of today’s snow…


…and a video clip of last year’s snow, two weeks short of a year ago.

Stay warm and dry if you can. (Yeah, yeah, Solar, I know you will!)

Winter yard work

Global warming aside, winters tend to be mild on Planet Georgia. At least they seem that way to one who grew up in Michigan. Mrs. Fetched got me doing what I’d planned to do anyway — cleaning up the yard. I’d taken care of the front yard a while back, but had an issue preventing me from going much further.

The perfect Christmas tree,
if you have a bucket truck

She wanted to move some plants around, as part of a master plan to run a driveway loop around the front of the house, so we tackled that first. A yellowbell that gets run over a lot (like it cares) already was in the way of the proposed loop route, so we moved it out back. Five cypresses that grow into monstrous Christmas trees have sprouted around the big one (pictured here), so we dug up three of them, moved one to the back, and potted the other two. We can’t think of a good place to put them, so I think they’ll go to her mom.

That left the leaves — and without a generator, the blower couldn’t reach past where I’d already cleared things out. But when there’s a will, there’s a way, and Mrs. Fetched is nothing if not willful. She brought the blower around to the back yard as I was raking out from under the steps (a corner that traps leaves) and suggested we could use an outlet on the porch. It then occurred to me that there was an outlet just inside the basement door, and that was enough to get us going.

Even with fewer trees out back, we had a lot of leaves on the ground. Once you get beyond a certain point, the blower really isn’t much help — you just have to wade in with a rake and plow them around with your legs. We eventually got them down into the moonscape where Buster T. Butthead has his run, so now he has plenty of nesting material. We loaded up a tarp and took some of them to one of the pens as well.

Some kind of holly…

While working on the leaves, I noticed the yellow berries on the backyard hollies — but we raked until things got dim so I had to wait until this morning to get pictures. The light was better, so it was probably worth the wait (and thank God for another day off!). I also dragged out Clickzilla and took a few more; I’m looking forward to seeing how those turn out (film, jeez, how did we ever cope?).

We also designated one of the beds as the Official Herb Garden. I’m not going to move what’s already established — the rosemary plants are happy as can be, and the parsley took a big hit during the summer but has started recovering with cooler weather. I was given a big pot of garlic, so that’s going to get planted shortly, and I have chives in a pot that need to be planted. I’ll get some mint and oregano when the spring shipments start.

The bottlebrush aka Pampas Grass is still looking good out there. Some of the trees have already started to bud out, which is not good — we have at least two months of Anything Goes weather ahead of us, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to get clobbered by March.

Now that I’ve upgraded the blog, I’ve also tied it to my Flickr account. I’ll be futzing with the layout later, perhaps today.

Winding down

I will always remember Christmas 2006 as the first Christmas where I woke up to thunder. Talk about starting off with a boom….

Now that Christmas is over, the crazy time is starting to wind down. Of course, it doesn’t happen all at once — there are clearance items to buy (and put away for next year) and some shopping to do for Three Kings Day (aka Epiphany) on Jan. 6. We have our major gift exchange on Three Kings Day at FAR Manor — it gives us an opportunity (not always taken) to reserve Christmas Day as a religious observation, plus it gives us a week & a half extra to get presents (often at steep discounts).

Yesterday it was cool and wet; today it was cold and wet. Two of my basil plants are still hanging on; I’ve managed to remember to bring them inside on the coldest nights and the frost hadn’t got them yet. On the other hand, they’re not going to perk up and give me enough leaves to make one last batch of pesto… but I can’t bear to kill good plants. The third basil plant went to seed and checked out a couple of weeks ago; I’ve moved it under cover to dry out and then I’ll harvest the seed pods. I found a couple of seed trays laying around outside today; they’ve also gone under cover. I’ll plant basil and cilantro in them first thing next year.

I took this picture with my new smellphone; a Samsung A707 (The Boy dropped the old Moto, which prompted it to retire). It has a lot of stuff that I don’t really need, like an MP3 player and a 2.0 megapixel camera, but the price was right (after rebate, which Stinkular has been pretty good about honoring). I’ve started to go through the manual (which, so far, I’m not impressed with) to figure out how to set up the camera and so forth… but it beats the heck out of the Moto (which isn’t saying much, granted). It’s too nice to not worry about, though, so I’ll probably have to get a case for it soon.

Back to work in the morning for a few days, then another three-day weekend.