Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is reach for my iPhone and check the weather so I know how many layers to wear and whether I’ll need an umbrella and/or my snow boots or whatever. If there is something really awful going on out there, sometimes I will actually skip my walk but there are only a few weather conditions that are severe enough to make me do that. Extreme cold (under about 10 below zero Fahrenheit), lightning, and ice storms of the sort where every outdoor surface is covered by a quarter inch of ice (or more) and tree branches and power lines are falling down left and right. Every other kind of weather, I walk. Yeah, I am one of those fanatics. I get energized by exercise in the great outdoors and that is all.

*This* morning, the little red severe weather alert symbol was lit up on my phone’s weather app. How now? The temperatures were in the upper 30s, the skies were clear. What was up? Tornado? Blizzard? Hurricane? I didn’t think so. Turned out it was a FROST alert! Oh, come on. I am sorry but I can’t figure out why frost on the 16th of October here in the Great Lake State rates a red alert! I do not know much about farming but I would think that anyone who is seriously growing crops around here has pretty much harvested them for the season. This is LATE for the first frost. It is TYPICAL for the first frost to occur in September or even occasionally in late August. October 16th? Folks, we have had an unseasonably warm fall so far.

I got to thinking about alerts in general. I think that weather alerts are often overkill. We are always being threatened with huge blizzards in the winter. Probably about 5% of those we actually get significant snow. I don’t see how frost can ever be much of a threat to the average black-thumbed suburbanite (like meeeee). Unless maybe I walked outside barefoot and froze my feet. But I can SEE outside and know better (usually) than to do that kind of thing. I checked the homeland security site to refresh my memory on how those particular alerts work. I was surprised to see that we are actually at yellow right now because every time I’ve driven into Daytwa Metro for *years* now, it’s been orange. Oh, but that’s only for air travel. Okay. I think that our little frost alert today should have been coded at about blue. That would be adequate to warn people not to walk outside in their bare feet.

Anyway, it turned out to be a blue day. As you can see. Mouse and I drove over to Haberman’s today. Haberman’s has EVERYTHING but I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, probably because I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. But look what I *did* find! I bought enough of that gorgeous blue wool to make a short jacket or maybe a long sweater-type vest (it’s a little stretchy) and after I had that fabric cut, I found the sheer silver-streaked blue silk shown on top of it. Mouse got some black camel hair for a winter coat and some lace that she’s been eye-balling for a long time. And then. The mail came aaaaannnnnnd…. There was a package. For meeeeee! It contained the beautiful blue candelholder shown in the photoooo! I ordered it from Kingfisher Glass, which is my internet buddy agategal’s new Artfire shop. Very quick shipping and superb packing job. Agategal is better with bubble wrap than I am and I have sent a lot of fragile stuff to Cali in my time, so I am pretty good.

Wedding attire? Well, I have gone in several directions and talked myself down off of a couple of rather ambitious sew-it-myself ledges and I think I have come up with some ideas from my very own closet. Anyway, I am not the bride or even TMOTB/CMOH and, as the Beautiful Becky said, we’ll all look good after a bit o’ whine. And SHE is wearing, uh, beige, and she will look beautiful and there’s a baggy old kayak woman somewhere on the Planet Ann Arbor who has been trying for two days to pull her foot out of her mouth.

And the skies were not cloudy all day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 16th, 2010 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.