I am so done with winter. From the sounds of it, it will be eastern CT and LI that will get nearly 3 inches of snow and here in the west, not so much. But still, I'm sick of it. I want to see crocus and daffodils and tulips.
I spent the weekend expanding my already wide butt by sitting in the chair and crocheting my way through several projects. I took a break on Saturday evening and went out to dinner with Mom and Gretchen at Sakura's in Westport. The only exercise I got all weekend. The restaurant was wall-to-wall kids. For the most part the kids were quiet and well behaved but I can't help but wonder at parents who take a half-dozen or more (one table had 10 boys) to a place where the meals start at $25 - the tab for the table of 12 had to be $400 before tip.
As I said to Mom and Gretchen, watching several dozen pre-teen and teen kids... I'm very grateful I never had children. I love my brothers' kids and they have brought me nothing but joy for over 20 years... but they go home and that's the way I like it.
people are telling me it's this thing call son... sun...
whatever, it's creeping me out!
I'm used to grey skies and cold, white things assaulting me. I'm not sorry that nasty white seems to be gone but this glow... it's just really weird.
I heard on the radio DC has shut down due to the snow. What is their excuse when there is no snow?
Hugo Chavez has died: NYT Op-Ed In the end, an awful manager.
His death has a profound iimpact on Cuba as well, which is interesting.
Chavez' VEEP announced yesterday the CIA gave Chavez cancer. I guess the US doesn't hold the corner on crazy politians after all.
Somehow I don't find that re-assuring.
The DOW went over it's all time high yesterday and I'm not sure that is a good thing - irrational exuberance to quote Greenspan. As the sequester cuts start to kick in and effect not only state governments but also individuals, I think we might see the DOW crater over the summer.
Not much crocheting got done last night as I was watching NCIS. I don't multitask well.
Yup, new blizzard. Second in three weeks.
Gotta love New England.
The car is surrounded by snow. Up to the trunk. The car itself is completely uncovered due to the howling winds blowing the snow off the car. Weird. If I could work the camera properly I'd take a picture.
According to ye olde yard stick, I have 29 inches on the ground.
It's also freakin' freezing.
Upside: I'm making soup.
Biggest and Brightest Full Moon of 2010 Tonight
A Wolf Moon. I noticed this morning (I'm up long before the sun) that the moonshine seemed incredibly bright but I thought it was just the reflection of the snow and ice on top of the greenhouses. Apparently not.
Driving home last night was Not!Fun! I left Stratford around 5:15 pm, headed for Easton. There were very dark clouds in the west but I didn't think much of it until, on the 8/25, I drove into a snow squall. Clear and perfect visiblity and then WHAM!Blizzard! That was a first. I couldn't see beyond the front end of my car. The roads froze over fast and by the time I hit the Merritt Parkway people were slip-slidin' away. I am an accomplished and confident foul-weather driver but that mini-blizzard scared the crap outta me. When I finally made it to Sport Hill Road the local roads were a sheet of ice and there was a huge crash/multi-car pileup on the Sport Hill. I got stuck twice trying to get up the hills and finally made it to the Farm an hour and a half after leaving Stratford -- door-to-door is usually 20 minutes. It was a nightmare of a trip home.
Driving in extreme rain, snow, wind, fog... not an issue for me. I'm pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself. Ice? shudders Had I known what was ahead of me I would have thought twice about going home.
I could have used a shot of something when I finally reached my tranquil litle bungalow... tequila, scotch, bourbon, vodka. Sadly the house is free of alcohol. I will have to rememdy that deficiency post-haste!
and you probably have, because I'm usually six months out of date...
Yarn Find, kinda like eBay for yarn
and
Woot, which describes itself thusly:
Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been. But don't take our word for it: see what the online community has to say at this Wikipedia article.
an article I spotted:
The Afghanistan War Through a Marine Mother's Eyes
In other news, I had three or four inches of snow at the Farm overnight. It's howling like mad outside right now. The ride back home tonight should be "interesting" if this all freezes up.
Remembering a Snowstorm That Paralyzed the City
In the end, Mr. Lindsay won re-election in the fall of 1969, though his political career — including his switch to the Democratic Party in 1971 and his failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 — remained troubled.
Equally important, perhaps, the terrible snowstorm of 1969 highlighted how the handling of severe weather is a crucial test for politicians. It is a test that mayors in other cities would fail again and again.
North Korea to Close Reactor in Exchange for Raft of Aid
The NYT headline lacks gravitas, in my opinion. Gave me a mental image of rafts of food and fuel be floated over to North Korea.
Anyway...
The partner nations agreed to provide roughly $400 million in various kinds of aid in return for the North starting a permanent disabling of its nuclear facilities and allowing inspectors into the country.
Perhaps equally important, the United States and Japan agreed to discuss normalizing relations with Pyongyang. The United States will begin the process of removing North Korea from its designation as a terror-sponsoring state and also on ending U.S. trade and financial sanctions.
Among the negotiators, Japan did not agree to the aid package, however, saying it first needs to work out further bilateral issues regarding abductions by the North.
The accord sets a 60-day deadline for North Korea to accomplish the first steps toward disarmament, and leaves until an undefined moment — and to another negotiation — the actual removal of North Korea's nuclear weapons and the fuel manufactured to produce them.
Under the agreement, the first part of the aid -- 50,000 tons of fuel oil, or an equivalent value of economic or humanitarian aid -- would be provided by South Korea, Russia, China and the United States; in the case of the United States, that would require congressional approval, which is likely to be difficult to get.
For disabling the reactor and declaring all nuclear programs, the North will eventually receive another 950,000 tons in aid. Further negotiations are to begin on March 19 in Beijing.
But North Korea has sidestepped previous agreements, and is thought to have many mountainside tunnels where it can hide projects.
/O.NEW.KOKX.WS.W.0001.070213T2300Z- 070215T0300Z/ NORTHERN FAIRFIELD- 503 AM EST TUE FEB 13 2007
...WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 6 PM THIS EVENING TO 10 PM EST WEDNESDAY...
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN UPTON HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WARNING... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 6 PM THIS EVENING TO 10 PM EST WEDNESDAY.
LIGHT SNOW IS EXPECTED TO BEGIN LATE THIS AFTERNOON...BECOMING STEADIER AND HEAVIER TONIGHT. AS WARMER AIR MOVES INTO THE REGION WEDNESDAY...THE SNOW WILL LIKELY MIX WITH SLEET DURING THE DAY...POSSIBLY CHANGING ENTIRELY TO SLEET OR FREEZING RAIN FOR A BRIEF PERIOD OF TIME. AS THE STORM MOVES TO THE NORTHEAST LATE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON AND COLDER AIR FLOWS BACK INTO THE AREA...THE PRECIPITATION WILL CHANGE BACK TO ALL SNOW BEFORE TAPERING OFF AND ENDING WEDNESDAY NIGHT. TOTAL SNOW AND SLEET ACCUMULATIONS BY THE TIME THE PRECIPITATION ENDS COULD RANGE FROM 8 TO 14 INCHES...WITH ABOUT A TENTH OF AN INCH OF ICE ACCRETION POSSIBLE DURING PERIODS OF FREEZING RAIN.
THERE CONTINUES TO BE SOME UNCERTAINTY AS TO THE EXACT TRACK OF THE LOW... WHICH WILL HAVE AN IMPACT ON PRECIPITATION TYPE AND SNOW AMOUNTS.
A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW... SLEET... AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE.
The snow just won't stop. Intense lake-effect snow squalls that buried communities along eastern Lake Ontario for nine straight days diminished Sunday — then started up again early Monday.
"It's snow. We get a lot of it. So what?" said Allan Babcock, a lifelong resident who owns Shar's Country Diner, a popular eatery in this village of 650 people.
Snow again last night, just a dusting, but schools were delayed. Why? Who knows.
But this is London and the 77-square-foot former storage room — slightly bigger than a prison cell and without electricity — is going for $335,000.
A coffin-sized shower is en suite, and storage is provided by a shallow closet and 10-inch-deep shelves cut into the wall. Two hot plates and a small sink make up the kitchen. Two dirty windows allow light to filter into the basement room, and the fire escape could conceivably double as a shared patio.
With no electricity or heating, Scott said it would cost an additional $59,000 to make the room habitable.
Americans flying to Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean made sure to bring their passports Monday because of a new rule going into effect Tuesday that requires them to show one to get back into the country.
We've had our first snow of the 2006/2007 season. Just a dusting and it'll be gone soon.
In the hazy world of Iranian politics, such a public rebuke was seen as a sign that the supreme leader — who has final say on all matters of state — might no longer support the president as the public face of defiance to the West.
It is the first sign that Mr. Ahmadinejad has lost any degree of Ayatollah Khamenei’s confidence, a potentially damaging development for a president who has rallied his nation and defined his administration by declaring nuclear power Iran’s “inalienable right.”
It was unclear, however, whether this was merely an effort to improve Iran’s public image by lowering Mr. Ahmadinejad’s profile or was signaling a change in policy.
"The administration's reservoir of historical analogies seems limited to the 1914-1991 period. And it's all about Europe," said Adam Garfinkle, a former Rice speechwriter who edits the foreign-policy journal The American Interest. "No one in a senior position in this administration seems to have even the vaguest notion of modern Middle Eastern history."
She tends to portray events, particularly the clash between what she calls "moderation" and "extremism" in the Middle East, as driven by huge, almost inevitable forces that make diplomacy impractical, or even irrelevant. Critics say such a view has made Washington's top diplomat less flexible in policy making -- and less adept in old-style negotiation and hand-holding, whose results also can be hard to quantify in the short term.
Those who clamor for sitting down with Syria and Iran are out of touch with what Ms. Rice calls "the underlying forces."
"There's a tendency to think about diplomacy as something that is done untethered to the conditions underlying it or the balance underlying it," she said. "In fact, that's not the way that it works. You aren't going to be successful as a diplomat if you don't understand the strategic context in which you are actually negotiating. It is not deal-making."
"If early and meaningful action is not taken, the U S economy could be seriously weakened, with future generations bearing much of the cost," Bernanke said yesterday at a Senate Budget Committee hearing.
