Open Door

Unlike so many who got behind it on the south side, Jason and I decided to bust on the Stuttgart, AR storm in a new and unusual way. Actually, we busted on three separate tornado-warned storms within two hours. If that’s some sort of record, somebody please let me know.

Unsurprisingly, we chose the eastern AR target yesterday and avoided eastern OK/southeastern OK target like the plague due to the less than favorable chase terrain there.

Anyway, we left home around 11am and sat in north L.R. for the late morning and early afternoon. Saw Currens on Spotter Network blasting down I-40, LOL. Monitoring data and sitting on the north side of the warm front, we deemed it was best to head south to Pine Bluff and assess from there, as the high-CAPE air, sunshine, and cu fields were all down in that vicinity and at the time it looked like southern AR to southeastern AR may be the place to be. Arrived in Pine Bluff (a.k.a. the Armpit of Arkansas) at approx. 2.00PM, and sat up near the mall in their spacious parking lot for hours watching data. Took my compass out and stood in the middle of their parking lot watching our winds veer from southeasterly to southerly to southwesterly. Great. Our benign cu field stayed that way for the longest time, and Jason and I partook in a game of “catch the Mardi Gras beads” in the stiff southerly winds. I really need a Frisbee.

So 4PM came and went, the afternoon threatened to turn into evening, and our cu field began to dissipate. AR appeared to be under the influence of an upper level shortwave ridge, and was still pre-upper-support arriving. Meanwhile, there were thundershowers moving into north-central and west-central AR from some OK junk that rung our alarm bells and, considering that it was far more fruitful of an idea to head back north towards L.R., AND see “some” type of convection - we thankfully left Pine Bluff and headed back towards L.R. Halfway between Pine Bluff and L.R., while watching the thundershowers on radar closely (we’re all too familiar with what disorganized thundershowers can do in these parts), I had the opportunity to nowcast for Brian Emfinger, a fellow AR chaser, who was trying to grapple with the McAlester storms around that time they were going tornadic. Hopefully I helped out - if so, I at least came away something from yesterday.

Anyways - we got some gas in L.R., used the nastiest restroom I ever have, and sat up in the parking lot of the Clinton Library for an hour or so at 5PM. While gazing wistfully at the array of convection - both mushy and somewhat harder - exploding and dancing above my head, I spotted a really neat midlevel funnel backlit by the blue sky, which was extending from a tiny piece of ragged cu. We jumped out and Jason snatched some video. Pretty cool. After that excitement, we saw that an isolated area of harder convection to our northeast near Carlisle, AR was looking a bit stronger on radar - although not yet severe. Favoring this over the junk moving into west L.R., we headed east on I-40 to intercept this area of multicellular storms and see what it had.

Then things started to go downhill in a hurry.

Once we got to near Carlisle and realized that we had gained no ground on the storm driving at 75mph for approx. 30 minutes, and taken a look at GRL3 and realized that the (now severe-warned) southernmost storm of the mess that moved into western L.R. was now threatening to have an appendage (couple of profanities slipped out here), we cut loose from the storm we were pursuing which was now bearing down on wherever (I dunno - De Valls Bluff by now???) and doubled-back to target the southern L.R. storm which was looking quite threatening. Indeed, no sooner had we done this than a TOR was issued for it. And - no sooner had this happened than our entire laptop crashed due to a problem downloading a SpotterNetwork update. Every window froze, we lost our GPS fix and could not re-acquire, and GRL3 ceased updating. The machine wouldn’t even restart from windows, so I had to jam the power button down and forcefully make it switch OFF.

With no data and a blank laptop screen, we entered the northern extent of the two tornadic supercell’s cores around Lonoke. Blinding rain and intense CGs abound, along with terrified drivers slamming on their brakes led to us trying to thread our way into the city again. My nerves began to get a tad bit filed here, I must admit. At long, long last the laptop finally rebooted from the Welcome screen to the actual desktop, and we managed to bring up GRL3 again to see what was going on. Our GPS program would still not acquire a fix. What BS. The southernmost supercell moving across south L.R. was looking downright scary and was taking a fix on England sometime in the mid-future, and the initial lead rotating updraft had retained it’s supercellular characteristics and couplet and placed itself just east of our interest storm, leading to the NWS’s long, rectangular TOR box to cover all of the possible areas of rotation.

So there we were, with no GPS, skirting the north side of two tornadic supercells, unsure of what the hell we could - or wanted - to do. We pulled off at Exit 161 in blinding rain and small hail and went into the third round with our GPS software and finally got it working. But it was too little too late. Way back in Lonoke, where we had had a south road option, we should have taken it - right at the point our whole laptop croaked. The profanities came a little more fluently now in the Politte vehicle. Our tornadic supercells continued munching through the countryside to our south by about 15-20 miles at 55mph. We assessed. The only option that was realistic that would give us hope to witness the intensifying southernmost storm was to head south of where we were currently on 391 (Valentine Rd.) and try and thread the needle in-between the two hooks, placing ourselves just east of the most intense storm once breaking through.

We started our route south and immediately got blinded by torrential rain, small hail, and pretty high winds. Our road skirted “Faulkner Lake”, and not only did we have to worry about our situation w/r/t the storms, but we also had to worry about encountering flooding. Some low-lying areas of the road were already starting to get standing water on them. We travelled two miles down this road at 40mph in blinding conditions before I started to feel sick to my stomach and decided to initiate my “is this really a good idea?” sequence. We pulled off in some random piece of parking lot at god-knows-where and assessed again while the winds went crazy and the clouds above our rain raced northeast. Radar pretty much told us everything - it was hopeless. The strong tornadic storm was already almost due south of us, and also a new type of storm had been identified - the “Bodyguard Storm”. The supercell that had been east of the strongest one had slid - all the while retaining it’s strong-possibly-tornadic couplet - in above the main storm of interest, piggy-backing it. Two potentially tornadic couplets oriented in a N-S line doesn’t make for a very good intercept of the southernmost storm if you begin on the north side of the complex.

Weak.

So obviously we prized our lives more than the chase and abandoned the whole chase, opting to head north to the interstate again before we got ourselves into any sort of real trouble. The drive back north to I-40 was one of my less favored in several years, and we managed to “identify” or “sample” a circulation into the bargain as well. Strong north winds rushed into “something” behind us as we crawled north and passed many vehicles pulled off the road, the winds smashed into the trees on the side of our road, and then a second later we had westerly winds pushing the driven precip into the driver’s side of the vehicle. I only knew that we had come uncomfortably close (for me) to yet another one of those rain-wrapped *somethings* (just like on Dumas day last year). In retrospect, this may have been the developing circulation that went on to produce the “possible brief touchdown” mentioned in SPC’s logs as: 0020 2 E LONOKE LONOKE AR 3479 9186 POSSIBLE BRIEF TOUCHDOWN WAS REPORTED AT MILE MARKER 173 JUST SOUTH OF INTERSTATE 40. (LZK)

We got back to I-40 and assessed data again all the while noting that the storm to our east that we let go had gone TOR too. Two busts down - but we still had one left in us - and that was reserved for the Searcy TOR storm. We attempted to salvage something and blasted northeast on 167 towards this big, meaty SUP, and somewhere just east of Cabot it became obvious that this rocketing storm was also outwith our grasp, and we threw our hands up and gave in on the day.

Got back into Conway at about 9.00PM just in time to grab the worst burger I have ever had from our local Sonic, and collapse and watch our soccer team lose another game on television.

Frustrating day and very sad to hear of the loss of life and much damage that came from yesterday’s outbreak.

KP

No, not you - me. I need to get off my butt. This post is going to act as a placeholder so that in a few months time, I can look back and either tell myself I’m a total loser, or pat myself on the back and congratulate myself on my hard work.

In addition to my chocolate diet (that is - a diet devoid of chocolate - spurred by the desire to finally get a clearer complexion), it is FINALLY time to put my foot down and start an exercise regime. I can sit here and I can reel out a thousand different reasons and excuses and whines about why I haven’t done this before now - but that would make me sound even more like a loser. Don’t have the time, don’t have the energy, don’t have the inclination, have something better to do, too busy, too hot, too cold, too wet, too windy, too stressed, too broke (WTF?), too particular about my hair, too much laundry to do, too much FFX to play, too many LA Galaxy games to watch, too many storms to chase, not enough storms to chase, too many family members all wanting attention, too many projects on the go, too much DIY to do, too much grass needing cut, too many vegetables needing planted. They’re all BS - every single last one of them. I grew UP walking, exercising, being healthy - while I was at school, taking exams, working full time office jobs - I FOUND the time.

Well - the time has been found again. Now I am going to have no time for sitting and watching my rear end slowly expand beyond mild amusement and into the realms of ridiculousness. No time for worrying about the skin under my arms and how much more dangly it’s going to get as I approach mid-life. I’m an adult, I live my own life (ooooh!, that reminds me of Auron’s fantastic tirade that he unleashed during my game of FFX last night! ), and I KNOW that if I put my mind to something - I can achieve it easily. I have already proven that to myself countless times.

Now is one of those times.

Three vigorous walks or cycles per week for 30 minutes. Twenty sit-ups per day five days per week. Twenty reps on each arm with a dumbell per day five days per week.

Day 1, 5/9/2008. Height = 5′4″. Weight = 129lb (give or take 1lb of water retention). Yes - that’s my weight. No - I don’t care.

Wish me luck.

EDIT:

LOL. OK - I couldn’t resist it. I Googled Auron’s (apparently famous from what I read online) quote from the ruined dome/Lady Yunalesca fight section of FFX - and here it is, in all it’s totally-edited-and-butchered glory, made to fit my workout pledge. Let’s hope I can adhere to it - or else I’ll have my ass kicked by an Unsent.

Now! This is it! Now is the time to choose! Sit there and be free of pain, or get up and fight your lethargy! Now is the time to shape your body! Your fate is in your hands!

Not bad.

It’s a sloooooow day at the office.

Now - two months on from our wedding - I’m finally finding time to do many of the things that had to be put on hold for a while. One of those things is sorting through all of the wonderful photographs that we are so lucky to have from our wedding day on March 1st. I remember Jason and I laughed somewhat hysterically while planning our wedding when - after research - we unearthed the standard going-rate for hiring a wedding photographer. $5,000 just for a couple of hours and their very minimum service package. More likely, $5,000 to have a mediocre guy with a fancy-schmancy digital camera buzzing around our hair all day taking twee, run-of-the-mill pictures.

So, in true Karen-and-Jason style, we opted for a much more personal solution. We were very fortunate to have many family members offer and agree to be present with their cameras (several relatives of ours have digital SLRs and digital cameras capable of TIFF format) to capture our memories for us, and nobody could have surpassed what they did for us. Two dads, an aunt, an uncle and a friend captured the occasion with more respect and dignity than a stranger ever could have.

Here is just one of our treasured images…

This image was the photograph we submitted for our wedding announcement in the local newspaper, the Log Cabin Democrat.

I will likely keep posting the odd image here - so expect more to appear eventually.

A week of dry - albeit humid - weather has allowed me to plant even more of my collection of vegetables. As an aid to my memory - I am going to post notes of what was planted when here.

Heatwave Tomato (1 plant) - planted April 30th, 2008. (70 days to maturation approx. July 9th)

Yukon Gold potatoes (2 seed potatoes) - planted April 30th, 2008. (71 days to maturation - approx. July 10th)

Fajita Bell Pepper (1 plant) - planted April 29th, 2008 (77 - 80 days to maturation - approx. July 12th.)
(As above for two Sweet Bell Pepper plants I have planted also)

Silver Queen Sweetcorn (9 plants) - planted April 30th, 2008. (92 days to maturation - approx. July 31st)

Ozark Beauty Strawberry bush (4 plants) - planted April 29th/30th, 2008. (60-70 days to maturation - approx. June 30th - onw., but suppressing fruition until Fall to get a crop this year)

Well, ’tis the planting season, and there’s many reasons to be jolly in our household this month.

Firstly - it is nice to know that our “mowing situation” is well and truly taken care of. For those of you who don’t know - the garden at our house’s rural location measures in excess of an acre (and possibly as much as two or three acres, as we haven’t measured it). For over a year now, we have been mowing the lawn by hand with a push-mower. Thirteen months and a few busted body parts later, we have finally sprung and caved-in to buying an (albeit used) RIDING MOWER! WoooowooooooooHOOOOOOOO!!!!! :LOL:

Our mower is a “Murray Widebody LT” of 2001 vintage. It is structurally and mechanically sound, although the paintwork is a bit dulled and the decals are rubbed off. But that’s OK. The mower itself is physically sound, the oil is clean, and it just about pulls a wheelie when you start off on it (well, at least it does when Jason drives it ROFL). The engine is a very clean 17.5HP Briggs & Stratton, and it has a 42″ cutting deck (compared to our push-mower’s 20″ cut). We have decided to call him Sammy. Well, rather, I decided to call him Sammy. Jason doesn’t really have a say in it.

I tried to find some pictures online but to no avail. I think I’ll take a picture of him once we get him cleaned up a little and add it on here. We paid a bit more for him that we were in the market for - but that just about applies to any purchase these days it seems. Plus - we bought him in the absolute peak season for people wanting to sell mowers - mid-April. It was a seller’s market.
The owner had two for sale, and had already sold one on the morning of the day we went by to look at the machine. All in all - we’re pretty happy with our purchase and are crossing our fingers that Sammy will last for a long, loooonnng time.

The addition of Sammy to our family has really spurred me on to get stuck in to the garden - and seeing as we are in the heart of the planting season, I finally decided it was time to take care of a few personal goals and ambitions that I had in our garden. While walking round Wal-Mart’s garden section on Monday evening, and looking longingly at all of the fruit and vegetable plants that I would love to grow, I had an epiphany. Rather than stand there and think of all the reasons why I couldn’t grow them (i.e. no extra flower bed available, no formal vegetable plot dug-out and tilled), I thought about all the reasons I COULD do ti (i.e. a huge garden, a huge bed just waiting to be de-turfed and tilled, plenty of time on the weekends and evenings now that the nights are light and the days are warm) and bought my FIRST VEGETABLE PLANT!!!
It was a pack of nine small, sweet bell peppers……and so the quest began!

So - this morning I had the day off work until 1.00PM for Administrative Professional’s Day (very nice!), and at 7.30AM I was to be found in Home Depot’s garden section with a flatbed cart, humphing huge bags of pine bark mulch and topsoil compost onto it. I also picked out three more plants for my beginning-vegetable patch - two strawberry plants and one more pepper plant - this time a Fajita Bell.

Once home at 8.00AM, I started work in the garden. After work last night, Jason and I had set-to the huge planting bed on the east side of the house - changing it from a long strip that needed mowed every fortnight to a deep planting bed full of rich brown soil. The change wasn’t that hard to facilitate, either - thanks in part to our flooding rains of the past month or so, which made the ground very soft and pliable under the first half inch or so. As I write this, I currently have 3/5ths of this bed de-turfed, tilled, composted and mulched. It looks awesome. I have sore fingers and sore arms, but I don’t care. Three or so hours of shovel-slicing, hand-tilling and crawling across the bed on my hands and knees shaking the earth out of the loose clods of turf later - and I am more than halfway into my project of finally reclaiming this ferile planting ground from our lawn. Awesome!

I used Scott’s Miracle-Gro Organic Choice Garden Soil, mixing a small amount of that in with our existing good soil. For the plants, I only have three different varieties so far - but they have all been bought from a supplier by the name of Bonnie Plants (rather ironic name given that I’m Scottish ). I have their Fajita Bell pepper, another small bell pepper plant which I cannot locate on their website, and two Strawberry bushes of the Ozark Beauty variety. After I had shoveled turf, tilled, weeded and mulched 3/5ths of the bed I didn’t have a whole lot of time left before having to shower to go in to the office, so I only managed to plant the two strawberry bushes and the Fajita Bell. The nine small sweet bells will have to wait till the weekend sometime.

I am excited about the strawberry variety I bought as they are reputed to be ever-bearing, bearing fruit in summertime and also in Fall. The first year’s fruiting is supposedly very weak - which I wasn’t aware of, but apparently one can still eke out some fruit in the first year from ever-bearers by suppressing fruiting for the first round by snipping off any blooms that develop, and letting the bush fully mature it’s second onset of blooms in late summer/early fall. This is the technique I will use to try and get some fruits from these bushes this year. I may also buy some more bushes with a view to next year’s harvest, and snip every single blossom from them all year in an effort to get a bumper crop next year. We shall see. To compensate for the fact that we may not get very many strawberries this summer, I will diversify the types of vegetables I try and grow for this summer’s use, mixing varieties in with each other in the same bed (true cottage-garden style). Along with my peppers, I intend to try potatoes, parsley, squash and perhaps some tomatoes (and anything else that takes my fancy!).

Our Fajita Bell pepper plant reaches maturity in 77 to 80 days from planting - giving us a possible harvest time of around July 12th.

I will assume similar maturation rates for the unknown pepper plants.

The strawberries should reach maturity in about 60 to 70 days, and I would expect that the first harvest (should we allow it) should be coming on by around July 4th. If we suppress this first fruiting, the second harvest could come in Fall but I have no idea when. Mid-September?

Wish me luck! Now I have to stop typing with my sore fingers……

I love spring.

The newest category I have felt inclined to add to my Blog (let’s hope it doesn’t fall the way of Product Reviews and Culinary Comments - ROFL!) is Restaurant Reviews.

A pastime that both Jason and I are fond of is trying new and exciting eateries around our local area - and Conway has quite a good selection if you know where to look. Over a year ago we had the idea to put some of our local restaurants on my Blog with a review of our eating experiences there - but it has been a long time coming to actually get around to it. But - after we ate at the newest addition to Conway’s culinary quota, Terrazza Italian Restaurant - we found it necessary to finally start this section of Open Door. And so we start the first of what will hopefully be many reviews of our local dining establishments!

————————————————————————————————-

Terrazza Italian Restaurant is located at 1090 Skyline Dr in Conway - just west of I-40. It is in the premises of the former “Salsa’s” Mexican Restaurant, which fell by the wayside about a year ago. Terrazza’s opened a couple of months ago, but we had never got around to trying it until this past Friday night. We were thoroughly impressed!

The atmosphere in Terrazza’s is pleasant and the interior has been refurbished to resemble Italian tiled courtyards. The wait staff are all very keen and helpful, and we were shown to a table immediately upon arrival.

Terrazza’s menu is enormous. In addition to all the traditional Italian pastas such as Lasagna, Cannelloni, Shells and Penne in a variety of fresh-sounding, authentic recipes, Terrazza also offers dishes such as ribeye steak, grilled salmon and calamari. It also must be mentioned that their dessert menu is impressive - and that they make all of their own desserts in-house (no CITGO pies here!!). If you have a sweet-tooth, you would be highly recommended to try a different dessert every time you visit this establishment until you’ve worked your way through them all!

Our experience at Terrazza was almost completely positive. Unfortunately, the restaurant does not yet have it’s liquor license, and so diners are confined to soft drinks and (their excellent) iced tea. Jason ordered unsweet iced tea, which came and proved to be the best-tasting and strongest iced tea he had ever had in a restaurant. I kept it simple with a glass of water - I am usually frugal when dining out.

For food - Jason ordered the grilled salmon with lemon butter sauce and fettuccine. I ordered the Pasta Milan with chicken. While we were waiting for our entrees, the staff brought us a gratis small basket of bread with a good garlic spreading butter. This was excellent.

Our food arrived in no more than 20 minutes. Initially, Jason’s order was mixed up, which resulted in him getting a couple of extra portions of vegetables/potatoes than he normally would have. This was only a small setback, however.

Jason’s salmon was perfect. It was not a freeze-dried slab of “salmon”, and it was not cooked beyond recognition. He was presented with a perfectly cooked, moist, flaky salmon steak that had been cooked with as much care as we cook it ourselves at home. The lemon butter sauce was a great accompaniment to the salmon and also did not overpower the fish. The fettuccine pasta was perfect, and the “accidental” serving of vegetables and baked potato were all of high quality.

My pasta was similarly impressive. The Fusilli pasta was tossed in - as advertised - nothing more than warm olive oil, and the dish was laced with full-bodied taste derived from plump black olives and strong sun-dried tomatoes. The perfectly-cooked broccoli was a great addition to the recipe, and the strips of marinated, home-cooked chicken were absolutely delicious and had a strongly home-roasted flavor.

For dessert, Jason finally got to try a Crème Bruleè - and he was not disappointed. I have it on his assertion that it was excellent and perfectly executed, complete with the caramelized crust and a luscious strawberry on top. I dislike Creme Brulee and so I only tried a small teaspoonful - although I can imagine that if one liked Crème Bruleè, one would have greatly liked this one.

All in all, Terrazza Italian Restaurant is an awesome addition to Conway’s dining scene and for their prices (our total meal cost us less than $30), you really need to make this restaurant a part of your itinerary if you haven’t already!

Score: 9.3 / 10

Yes here I am, for the first “chatty” update in well over a month. Sorry about that. LOL.

Well……sigh. Where to start. The joy and hectic pace and revelry of our wedding and our Honeymoon have passed into fond, warm memory, and we are now well and truly back to normal (cue the violins…). Back to work, back to doing laundry, and back to running the dishwasher what seems to be three times a day (that’d be my fault, LOL). Not to mention back to armchair chasing, and gardening.

Gardening - or moreover, anything to do with the outside of the house, is beginning to take up ever-increasing amounts of our spare time, a sure sign that the growing season is upon us. The past few months of weather through the winter and early spring have wreaked havoc on our poor little house. It’s got nothing to do with the four Scottish people who ran amuck in it for three weeks or so in March (honestly! ), but more to do with good old Mother Nature and her cohorts of snow, wind, rain, rain and rain. Through all of this, our spring bulbs did indeed flower along with our gorgeous Downy Serviceberry tree - but the spring crescendo of color was short-lived as storms quickly blew all of the blossoms off the trees a couple of days ago.

Last night was interesting. It doesn’t seem to rain normally here anymore - it just floods. I mean - it’s either bone dry with a Td in the 30s, or we are six foot under water. Consequently - our rain goods on our house have taken a severe beating over the past three months or so. Almost every single one of our gutters were choked with tree debris, and the gutter next to the garage door had clogged so badly that it was overspilling during heavy rain. This caused dramatic pooling of water right next to our garage door that the *slight* slope away from the house just couldn’t handle. The pooling of water seeped in under our 1930s-style wooden garage door and hey presto……we had a flooded garage.

So - last night we decided to be brave and venture out into our yard. We considered taking an inflatable dingy with us - but seeing as it would have been one extra thing to buy we chose not to. After work we made a lightning-fast trip to Home Depot to get two tools-of-the-trade needed for gutter work - a ladder, and a plumber’s auger (also know as a pipe “snake”, for unclogging blockages in plumbing). Joy abound! It was partly sunny, slightly breezy and in the 60s when we got back home to start our evening work on our house after working all day at the office. We got the ladder set up pretty quickly, removed the over-gutter gratings from the problem area and set to the clogged downspout with the auger. It was completely clogged tight. After some wrestling with the auger and forcing it down the spout, we got it to unclog and work it’s way down until it - comically - came waggling out the end of the gutter near the ground. One blockage down - three to go.

We ate dinner in-between gutters and then came back out to finish unclogging the rest of our rain goods before it got dark. I dug a trench (yes - ME - dug a trench. That gives you some idea of just how damn WET the ground is around here!) down and away from the gutter that had caused the garage door to flood, and angled a makeshift water-distributor (a/k/a wooden plank) underneath and away from the gutter to attempt to divert the water flow away from the area that it pools in. We chucked about three buckets of water down the finished product and the water, after trickling down the “water-distributor” ( ) and pooling at the bottom of the trench in a “catchment-area” (a/k/a deep muddy hole) that I had also dug, finally started to seep away from the house into the yard. Maybe problem solved. Jesus Christ I hope you’re not a plumber or a landscaper reading this!

We used the clay and soddy grass that I had dug out to make the trench to partially fill-in a large hole that had opened up in the west-facing portion of our back garden. Only trouble is - this hole was directly next to the house and really led UNDER the house - so creating a perfect little abode for another one of our fuzzy little friends. Jason filled this in with what sod and clay-water mixture (note - I am refraining from saying soil or dirt - as that term no longer applies in Arkansas after this much rain) was leftover after we had packed a makeshift levy next to our garage door with the majority of my diggings. We hope that this will further aid the prevention of the water pool, but this remains to be seen. It’s all temporary of course - but the problem is our forecast looks like this:

This afternoon:

Tonight:

Tomorrow:

Tomorrow night:

The Day After Tomorrow ( ):

Mmmmkay, and hence the reason for our temporary repairs. As it turns out - today so far has been delightful, with a light breeze, dry, warm, and sunny. Another busted forecast - but who am I to criticize? The fact remains that the next flooding rain event is on it’s way - and we have done our damndest to make sure that our garage doesn’t flood any more.

After this, at sundown, we bravely decided to go a walk around the house to survey the standing water and the rest of the gutters. Most of the rest of them appeared to be working OK. We had to navigate a large bog that has been created in our backyard from the recent rains to get around the back of the house. It was right about then that I made an interesting discovery - I found a huge hole in the ground which looked like somebody had driven a metal pole into and then removed it. I remarked in my surprised and pointed it out to Jason. He cursed comically and told me what it was. It was a crawdad hole. A crawdad. Crawdaddy. A freaking crayfish!!!!

Image courtesy MDC (yeah, obscure, I know).

Crawdads “are freshwater crustaceans resembling small lobsters, to which they are closely related. They breathe through gills and are found in bodies of water that do not freeze to the bottom; they are also mostly found in brooks and streams where there is fresh water running, and which have shelter against predators.”

We have something living in our backyard that breathes through gills. The nearest pond or stream is about a half mile away.

…

…….

GOT WATER?

Arrrgghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Deep breath. Okay - I think I’ve calmed down now.

In other news - I have been watching with interest the beginnings of the 2008 chase season. It was nice to see my rusty forecasting skills pin the target for Monday down to a county or so (southern OK near Antlers). I can’t be that out of practice I guess. Tomorrow brings the next big chase day, but as I understand it the 12Z model runs looked considerable less favorable than previous ones. I will have to take a closer look sometime but right now I don’t have the chance. Much more prevalent in my mind rather than the severe potential for this next system is the flooding rain that it will dump on Arkansas again……and into our gutters. Keep our poor downspouts in your thoughts, please.

I am a little excited tonight as I go home - I have a new cellphone waiting to be activated and a bluetooth headset to get charged up. We were due an upgrade from our carrier and we decided last week sometime that the time had come to upgrade to bluetooth devices. I’m a total novice with this sort of technology and it’d probably be better served in the hands of a fourteen-year-old, but nonetheless I intend to experiment with bluetooth, ringtones, internet access and all of the other amazing things that my new cellphones offers.
The only thing that matters to me is that it is a slide phone……forevermore hereinafter referred to as my Neo phone!

OK gotta run - this post has got a mind of it’s own!

Karen

It is to my profound joy that I announce that on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 3:30PM, I wed my Husband, Jason Politte. Two weeks ago to the minute, our ceremony was concluding.

Our marriage took place amidst the rolling hills of northwest Arkansas’ wine country under dusky-blue, sun-kissed skies. With summerlike temperatures thawing the surrounding the countryside gently from the raw winter, the Ouachita and Boston Mountains served as our backdrop as we exchanged our vows at Wiederkehr Wine Cellars, the oldest and largest winery in Mid-America. Since 1880 the art of wine making has been practiced by the Wiederkehr family on these fertile slopes, and the winery and it’s ancient restaurant built in the old wine cellar have come to know a very special place in both of our hearts.

Our day, made even more effervescent in our memories now due to it’s smattering of Celtic music, Scottish tartans and bagpiping, Swiss fayre and American hospitality (oh yes - and men in kilts ), will forever be recounted as the happiest in our lives so far.

Love is the only magic.

Merlin Said

Love is the only magic.

It enriches the giver
As it nourishes the object.

It serves as the instant
And washes over the ages.

It is as particular as the moon
And as universal as the stars.

If returned it is multiplied,
Yet spurned it is not diminished.

It is as lusty as the rutting stag
But chaste as the unicorn’s pillow.

It comes alike to the king on his throne
And the cutpurse in the market

If you would have magic,
Place faith in love or nothing.

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Due to many ongoing events and a busy home schedule over the next couple of weeks - this Blog will not purposefully be updated on any regular schedule. Apologies for the lack of reading material, and for the fact that there hasn’t really been anything much to talk about on here for the past little while. Real life is more important.

I will say, however, that if I don’t see some sunshine and warmer temperatures by the beginning of March I am going to lose my mind. This February sure has sucked ass - grey, cloudy skies, the odd heavy rain event at 35oF, and BS cold temperatures struggling to rise out of the 40s. I’m done with winter and I’m done with February. Bring on the start of the chase season - if only so that I can feel some warmth seep back into my bones again.

KL