Before the storm...Sunday morning

Sorry for the lack of posts these past couple of weeks. With a rush of (as always) last minute projects at work, and trying to do a little maintenance here at home I've barely kept up with emails and rss feeds of my normal reading.

I've also restarted my genealogy research. If you really want to kill some quantity of hours on the internet start doing genealogy as a hobby. What with trying to understand the forces that drove families to pull up roots and move on down the trail over and over and trying to follow the historical stories in each locale in which you follow ancestors and kin into, your reading load seems to increase exponentially. Actually, most of what I've been doing is filling in data on the closer generations of my families. The data now available online is so much greater than it was even three years ago that you can find numerous sources of new data on practically everyone in your dataset.

Enough of that though, as you can see from the title of this post we are setting this morning before the storm. The temperature is in the 70's and the wind is blowing strongly off the Gulf of Mexico just a few miles south of here. The humidity all day has been above 95%...eeck. Talk about summertime weather in the mountains. The thing that really struck me though was the number of Robin's in the yard this morning. As I poured my first cup of coffee today and stood in the open door of the kitchen there were two at my feet on the steps, another 50 or so on the ground in the back yard and that many or more in the trees above my head. Talk about Hichcockian moments...It felt like it was straight out of "The Birds". Before I had finished cup number two the Robin's had been replaced by Blue Jays, the other large flock representative of the winter bird population here. Now at noon we are totally absent any birds in quantity.

The storm mentioned above is supposed to hit us today and tonight with our high tomorrow just in the 40's (41 actually). They are (and have been for three days or more) predicting winter mix precipitation on Monday night and Tuesday. For our part of the world that's real rare. The number of snows I have seen here in the last half century can be counted on the fingers of both hands without using up all the digits. Sleet accumulations are just as rare. The  weather this year (as it seems everyone is mentioning) has been very strange. I have been watching the North Carolina weather around Boone for a number of years and last year I added Floyd County to my weather watch. I can't think of a winter where the temperatures here have been upside down with the mountains as much as they have been this year. While we have had a very mild winter, the Blue Ridge Mountains have had a milder one. While there are a number of benefits to this weather pattern, taken as a whole it is highly disturbing.

Time to get back to the chores I was working on before I sat down here with a glass of water to rehydrate...Keep the home fires burning (after the front anyway).