The first fire in the wood stove at the tirehouse, which I like to wait until November to build, happened one hour early; 11:00pm Halloween night, and it felt good. Today's cloud cover, cold, wild wind and temps in the 40's have me wondering why there isn't one going now. Clouds and wind may keep the temperature from getting to freezing early tomorrow morning but by Monday morning the clear cold air, not long from its home in the north of Canada, will bring the first frost/freeze to most of Virginia.
Now there is a fire going and by the time I'm done with this blog, the chill should be gone.
Where to start after more than 3 months of no blogging? We've gone from a lovely summer with lots of cool dry days and sufficient rain through a dry spell in September and October back to plenty of rain but no frost. The moon has leveled up with Earth to go through an eclipse cycle; a total lunar and two weeks later a partial solar, neither easily seen here in Va. Mars lingers in the west but low and the other planets are hidden behind the sun from earth view, in the evening, anyway.
The Atlantic hurricane season, while technically lasting another month, has been very quiet while the Pacific, that so poorly named ocean, has been anything but passive. 18 named storms at last count and several have pounded Baja California and drifted north to bring flooding rains to the desert southwest. The moisture from one actually made it all the way across the country to the east coast. Southeast Asia has been nailed several times with storms and Hawaii has had near misses.
Hawaiian volcanoes have stirred up of late, rolling lava into settled areas creating havoc for residents. Bardarbunga in Iceland has that island nation watching carefully, Popo outside Mexico City has also not taken much of a break for much of the late summer or fall. No big earthquakes of late, unless you live in Oklahoma, and they aren't big just ongoing, daily with likely daily denial from the oil (what's wrong with blowing up the earth for hydrocarbons) industry. When there are more earthquakes daily in Oklahoma than California, there is a problem and it's not the planet suddenly firing up a billion year old fault zone under the plains. It's all of us and our daily need, craving, refusal to change and greed for oil...and shopping.
And, with that, my oil tirade and look at the planet from a November view will wind down. The semester is in the home stretch, the fall party season here at the tirehouse is done and I face a big chronology check in 17 days. But, the planet spins on, not worried about us just doing that "big rock flying through space" thing that it has been doing for 4 1/2 billion years and will continue for likely several billion more. We'll see if our spawn are around to see what the future does indeed bring. For the moment, and that's really all we can deal with, I'm going to bundle up and go for a wander on this lovely little planet, hope you get out, too, today on Earth.
