Oct. 20, 2011 — An alligator was spotted on the grass near the water across from the [work building] this afternoon. It was a little over three feet long.

Although there should be no danger, please be aware when walking on or near grassy areas. In cooler weather, alligators often find a sunny soft spot to rest.

Security is addressing the problem.

Anyway!  The point was that it was cold!  And maybe I would have handled the temperature better if two days ago it hadn’t been in the 80s.  I mean, we went from highs in the 80s to highs in the 60s in the course of an afternoon.  It was warmer yesterday at 6:00 in the morning than it was at 4:00 in the afternoon.  That’s just not right!

So, obviously, the only solution is to make a trip up to the cold northern climes to reacclimatize myself to the temperatures, so yesterday Justin and I got tickets to make that trip.  I put our information about that on the forum on Erica’s website so interested parties can see that.  I’m looking forward to the trip!

Part of that excitement might be because it has been absolutely insane around here lately.  I don’t even have the time to go over how crazy it’s been, but trust me – crazy.  And my back is killing me.  And my addiction to the Layton franchise is going strong.  And I’m starting a new diet in order to lose a little weight before our trip up north.  And all of these things I should write about, but I don’t have the time right now because things are just so darn crazy.

But I’ll try to do something soon.  Like maybe I’ll actually take a Friday and not work!  Maybe . . . .

Of course, this means that when I was outside on Saturday, the temperature was so wonderful I didn’t even think to put on sunscreen and got a toasting across my face.  And it also means that I’m driving to work in the dark, wearing a sweater or jacket in from the car, and then carrying that sweater out to the car over my arm when I leave work in the warmth of the afternoon.

It’s wonderful!  Granted, I miss the north.  I miss the colors of the leaves and the fact that you’ve all been wearing sweaters and enjoying this kind of cool weather for about a month by now.  I finally went and got soup at the store yesterday because it’s finally getting cool enough that I can really enjoy hot soup.  And people made fun of my arm warmers because they’re jealous.  Obviously.  I mean, my arm warmers are pink! And fluffy!  And, most importantly, keep my arms warm!

I’ve been opening the window on my side of the bedroom when I go to bed to let in the cool air at night.  It gets warm again during the day, but at night, that cool breeze is delightful.  Unfortunately, my allergies have been acting up since the weather changed, but hopefully it’ll pass soon.  Or, you know, I’ll refill my very expensive allergy pills.  But I’d rather not.

The change of the weather also means that we’re heading into a very busy couple months.  October started out with Family Day at my workplace.  It’s great for families with children who can go play on the moon walk rides and be entertained by the midway games and have the patience to stand in line for a burlap bag and slide down a big slide.  Justin and I stood in line for the Ferris wheel for more than an hour (toasting my face), got some cotton candy, and then went to eat at a local Mexican restaurant.

This coming Saturday we’re helping at the Habitat for Humanity building project doing yardwork.  The Saturday after that is book club, and since it’s the 1-year anniversary of the club, we’ll probably be hosting a movie party at our house.  The week of the 16th is the local Seafood and Arts festival.  And the Friday after that, the last Friday of the month, we’re having a game night party at our house with a bunch of our local geeky friends.

And that’s just October!   November and December are going to be even more busy, I’m sure.  But I don’t mind that much, so far.  I’m looking forward to spending time with my friends and enjoying this fantastically cool weather.  I hope you’re all doing the same!

I’m at work, so I haven’t seen the weather since early this morning.  It’s been a LONG week.

I’ll keep you updated if anything changes.

On the other hand, Justin is helping the church move the equipment from the high school to a storage shed near the movie theatre on Friday and that would be miserable to do in the rain.  The school, where we have been meeting in the auditorium, was struck by lightning the week before last, I think it was, and it knocked out their fire alarm system.  The school worked out an evacuation plan so the kids are safe during classroom hours, but extracurricular activies and other people who rent the building are out of luck.  So we’ve moved to the movie theatre down the street.  All our kids ministry and music equipment is stored at the school, though, so the church has to move it out and down the street, but during hours when the school will let us in do to that.  So, Friday afternoon, hopefully, is when that’ll happen.

And the on Sunday, after church because Justin is on rotation to run the computer and projector and I’m on schedule for singing, we’re helping a couple of our friends move from Beaufort to Bluffton.  It kind of works out well that we can’t help in the morning because they have a cat that sheds like a maniac.  With any luck, they’ll be at the place in Bluffton by the time we get out to help and the cat will be safely tucked away somewhere and we’ll be able to help without dying from allergies.  But, again, it would be miserable to do that in the rain.

In other news, I hurt my knee a little bit running.  I landed on it wrong and hyperextended it just a little bit, probably.  It’s been hurting on the calf-side behind my knee.  But ice and Advil and rest and a really annoying knee brace and it’s doing much better already.  We took a rest day yesterday instead of our regular running schedule and it was GOOD.

Honestly, the rest day was only partially because of my knee and also because we’ve both been having  a heck of a week and we both just needed time to do absolutely nothing.  It’s been really crazy and we’re both feeling the strain.  So we ate leftovers for dinner, I folded the laundry that Justin washed during the day, and then I sat downstairs watching TV while he played computer games with friends online.  I finished off the bottle of wine, which really only meant I had a glass and a half, but it made me giggle.  And then we had ice cream cake that we found at the grocery store on Tuesday.  It was perfectly relaxing and wonderful and NEEDED.

Today we’re back at it, plugging away.  It’s going to get better eventually.  We just have to slog through a couple more week of this, hopefully, and then we’ll be out.

Hail forms when rain is pushed UP by a hot air updraft. It’ll go up to where the air is freezing cold, the water will freeze, and it’ll collect more and more ice as it goes up higher and higher in the cloud, even combining with other hailstones, until finally the updraft can’t lift it anymore (or it hits a downdraft) and it’ll fall, collecting more ice on its way back down through the cloud.

The theory of how hail forms has actually changed over the years and I had to rewrite that paragraph after reading more information.  It used to be thought that hail would do a cyclical thing going up and down and up and down and adding layers of ice for each cycle.  And that theory still holds for some people and some situations and it seems like there’s this debate about the whole thing with the people who believe that there’s just one up and down cycle, but many layers of air that effect how the ice forms around the hailstone.  And there are different theories about where this whole process takes place, either at the top of the storm or at the back.

The whole thing just started to get too complicated for me because all I really needed to know was that hail falls up before it falls down.  And that was really the most interesting part for me.

I also found it interesting that apparently a lot of people get hail and sleet confused.  Probably people who haven’t spent a lot of time in colder climates.  Sleet is rain that freezes on its way down.  It might start as a snowflake up high, hit a warm layer of air that melts it, and then hit colder air again as it gets closer to the ground.  It’ll freeze again before it hits the ground, but it’s basically the opposite of hail, which melts on the way down instead of freezing.

So there you go.  That’s your science and meteorology lesson of the day.

Eureka and Warehouse 13 started back up again on Monday so Justin and I have been catching up on that.  We missed the Christmas specials that they aired back in December, so one day we watched Warehouse 13’s new episode and the Christmas special for Eurkea, and then the other night we flipped and watched the new Eurkea episode and the Warehouse 13 Christmas special.  I love these shows.  And it’s probably silly but I find it hilarious that we’re watching the Christmas shows in July while it’s stupidly hot.  And there’s more science for you!  In Eurkea, Fargo and Zane got shot into space and had to find a way home and in Warehouse 13 . . . people were being killed with pieces of paper.  Okay, so not so much on the science.  But still!  Fun TV!

We have friends coming into town tomorrow evening and staying through the weekend.  We’re really looking forward to hanging out with them.  They’re the same friends we saw when we passed through Atlanta the last couple times, but this time, they’re coming down to visit us! We’re going to go to the beach and hit Savannah for the sites and play card games (because we’re NERDS) and it’s going to be a whole lot of fun.  But if you don’t hear from me for a couple days, it’s because we’re hosting guests.

We’re under an Excessive Heat Warning from the National Weather Service that says “A few locations could experience brief periods of dangerous heat indices around 120 degrees…”

A radio host this morning recommended checking on people you know who are without air conditioning.

Going outside is like stepping into a steam bath.  It’s hot.  It’s humid.  And the added bonus is burning light, with the chance of cancer!

It’s awful and I’m so ready for fall to get here, but we’ve got all the rest of July and August to get through yet before it even hints at getting cooler.  These are the days when I really consider my decision to move to the south.

And I don’t generally go into politics but every time I turn on the radio they’re talking about the “debt crisis” and congress and the president.  And I have this to say about that:  When my personal finances are in deep trouble, what I have to do is pretty clear.  I need to bring in additional income by getting a second job and I need to stop spending money on things that I don’t need to spend money on, even if I really like those things.  And I can’t just ignore that there’s a problem or try to increase my credit card limit in order to fix the problem because it only delays the inevitable – me being completely broke and handing everything over to the bank.

I don’t know the details about what’s happening and the deals they’re trying to make or anything about the complexities of national finances, but doesn’t it make sense that spending has to be cut, tax cuts have to be removed, and there has to be some sort of give and take between both sides of the issue?  This steadfast “NO, NO, NO” and refusing to just compromise even a little bit is getting so frustrating!  No one’s going to be happy with the solution in the end, just like I’d hate losing my weekends to another job or giving up eating at restaurants.  But sometimes it has to happen in order to get everything back in line.

I would be so thrilled to get into my car and hear that both sides of the aisle are upset but they’ve finally worked out a plan that’ll solve the problem and now we can move on and talk about something else.

The smoke from the fires in Florida are so bad today that there’s a haze everywhere, even up as far north as our house in South Carolina.  At work in Georgia, I can smell the smoke even when I’m inside the building.  It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t because the smoke smell was stuck in my hair, but that it was actually coming in through the ventilation.

And meanwhile, the people in Minot, ND, are looking at flooding eight feet higher than the record.  Eight feet more water than the last time they had major flooding?  That’s a LOT of extra water.

Where on earth is it going between there and the coast?  Can anyone explain that one to me?

In other news, I saw a great way to annoy people this morning:  Remind them that they need to attend a meeting, and then when the meeting starts, close and lock the door and turn away all people who show up to the meeting late.  While it’s a very good reminder that promptness is required, it’s really confusing to the people locked out and adds the burden of letting those people know what happened in the meeting to the people who were good enough to show up on time.  I have a hard time arguing with the fact that it’s an effective way to keep the meeting on track and inform people of what the leader thinks of tardiness.  But I’m not totally sure I agree with the tactic.

In other randomness, because I’m really just bouncing from one thought to another here, I realized that I have a strange fondness for documentaries on yoga.  I was checking out our Hulu Plus subscription last night and while I found a lot of interesting things that I would enjoy watching on there, I settled on watching a show about the yoga industry and how much money is in it and the controversies about that. (Should a yogi be interested in the money or is that against the very principles of yoga?  How about competitive yoga?  Is it an ancient tradition or is it a perversion of the practice?)

I’m not sure how I feel about a lot of those issues and my own yoga practice is in a sorry state.  I haven’t been to a yoga class in ages, since the gym closed down and I haven’t got the money to go to the yoga studio in town.  But I do enjoy yoga and I find it interesting to listen to the conversations about it.  It’s one of those things, like playing the guitar and speaking multiple languages, that I wish I could do well but haven’t found the patience to actually commit to doing.

I expect that I’ll be at work for at least part of the day tomorrow.  I have some projects that need to get caught up and there’s just not been enough time to do it.  Plus, being out sick on Tuesday didn’t help me much with the task load. On the up-side, after next week, I get a full week of vacation!

And it really was a fantastic day, with some sleeping in, and some working up a sweat getting the house cleaned (I even washed the patio doors!) and projects getting done (moving a couple thousand songs onto a petulant music box) and even a bike ride (where some guy threw us out of his neighborhood — but that was the only non-fantastic part of the day).  I feel like I got a lot accomplished, even though when Justin asked what I’d been doing for the last couple hours while he was working, the only things I could think of were the music box thing and the jewelry box, but I’m sure there was something else I did with that time.

Another storm is threatening to thunder overhead.  There’s been lightening and thunder for the last hour or so, but still not any rain.  I hope that it comes over this way a little closer and gives us another soaking.  The lawn is looking a little better — the weeds are getting higher and in need of cutting.  But the grass could still use a lot of help.  I’m sure it’ll start coming down in buckets as soon as I drift off to sleep, jerking me back awake in surprise.  Just like the phone will right just as you take a bite of food and the movie will start just as you realize that you need to pee.

Tomorrow we’re heading down to Savannah for a haircut date.  Justin’s scheduled a haircut and we’ll get dinner and then go see the Green Lantern movie.  We’ve got a couple other errands to run while we’re out, too.  But mostly it’s haircut, dinner, and a movie.  On Sunday, two of our friends are going to be in town for a conference on Hilton Head Island.  They’re going to crash here for the night instead of driving the 40 minutes back home and then back again for the conference the next morning.  So it’s going to be a fun-filled weekend!

It’s supposed to stay overcast and raining all day and into the weekend, which would be fantastic, but I’m not sure I believe that forecast. I expect that the skies will clear up a little, and then the humidity and heat will sky-rocket and it’s going to be a miserably sticky handful of days.

But this morning it was cool and wet and I would almost see the grass turning greener, like it was thinking, “Oh, yeah! So this is what water is like!”