Paula, My DS didn't go to the Palo Pinto/Possum Kingdom area. They sent their crew on a day he wasn't working, but he has stayed in touch with them. He said they finally got to take a shower and sleep after 2 days out fighting fires and they wanted everyone to know how very kind all the local residents, volunteers and folks at the Red Cross shelter had been to the firefighters. Anything the firefighters need is being supplied.....clean undergarments, socks, lip balm, etc. I think DS would dearly love to be out there at the fire. He said the airport sent a brand new $900,000 fire engine that wasn't even officially 'in service' yet. It is a huge truck and should be able to help protect a lot of structures. San Angelo is in such a beautiful, albeit rugged and dry, part of the state. I cannot imagine being a gardener and living there. What you can plant there certainly is highly limited! The Possum Kingdom lake area is so spectacularly rough and rugged as well. Unfortunately, many of the trees around PK where the wildfire has grown to about 200,000 acres, are cedar and mesquite trees and both burn like crazy. Luckily, they often regenerate quickly from their roots in some cases after wildfire, because it takes a certain rugged type of tree to grow out of that limestone rock. Parts of the Possum Kingdom Lake/Graham area got about 1.5" of rain last night, which ought to help in the areas that received it, but most of that area didn't have rain. We had a raging Tstorm last night that dumped a half-inch of rain here, but we had lightning and thunder for hours. The storm-line moved through at 60 to 70 mph so I bet I have more tree limbs and leaves on the ground today, and probably more plums on the ground as well. The wind has brought down so much fruit in the last couple of weeks that I'm beginning to think I won't harvest any fruit as well. (Guess the poor harvest is to balance out last year's amazing fruit harvest.) There's a slight chance of severe weather tonight, so I guess the best we can do is simultaneously hope that rain falls for everyone but that the severe portion of the weather fails to materialize. Dawn

Bon, I expect it will get pretty miserable here on Sunday too. I think our worst weather at this end of the state will be Sunday and Monday. Right now our temperature is hovering at 33 degrees, but most of the rain has moved on...not that much fell, a little over a tenth of an inch, but any rain is good. I can see more rain on the Texas radar to our southwest but when it gets about a county away from us, it vanishes. That's the story of our year---rain vanishes when it gets close to us. I won't mind if the ice vanishes before it reaches us though. (grin) For the rest of the weekend, the weather is expected to be about the same as it is right now---with temperatures here hovering in the low 30s and rain coming through in little waves. The issue will be whether the rain falls while we are at 32 or below or if if falls when we are 33 degrees or higher. Thursday was an odd day. We had snakes out in the yard, which I'm never happy about, but it was oddly warm for this late in November. We made it up to 69 degrees before the cold front rolled in and dropped us about 30 degrees in three hours. Earlier in the day, when walking past the garden on my way back from the mailbox, I saw a watermelon in the garden. How I have missed seeing it before now is beyond me, but it looked whole and intact, so I brought in the mail (so it wouldn't blow away) and went out to the garden to pick the watermelon. We have been down as low as 19 degrees, so I figured it was rotted on the bottom, perhaps, and only looked good on the top. I picked it from the dead vine, and it was whole and intact. How crazy is that? After carrying the melon inside, I cut it in half, expecting the flavor to be poor because we had so much rain in October and early November. If the flavor was poor, I was going to feed it to the chickens. Nope. The flavor was good. In fact, it was great, so I celebrated the survival of the watermelon by eating some of it, and saving the rest for other family members. Then I carried the rind out to the chickens and they happily picked it clean of any remaining bits of red flesh. Enjoying a slice of the 'Harvest Moon' watermelon in the final hours before a brutal cold front arrived was a fittingly weird end to a weird growing season. The plant itself had roamed and rambled around the garden before the freeze got it, and had produced plenty of melons in the summer months, but none in the fall. I never thought it would have produced a melon so late in fall that would survive several freezing nights. I likely didn't see it before because cosmos and zinnias sort of surrounded the part of the plant where this melon was. Still, I walk by the garden every day on my way to the mailbox and I do generally look at it as I go by, and I still don't know why I didn't see the melon before now. Harvest Moon was probably my best producer in terms of pounds of melons this summer, although Yellow Doll produced a larger number of melons per plant. It is just that Yellow Doll is a really small melon. I hope y'all stay warm and safe up there, and that the ice misses your place, or at least that it melts quickly. Our driveway is a long, gentle, uphill slope, so when ice falls, we sometimes have problems getting up or down the driveway without sliding off of it. That is reason enough (I think) to stay home when it is icy, but Tim and Chris both are pigheaded and try to make that long drive to work in Dallas despite the ice. I've been waiting for a quiet day to sit and flip through the seed catalogs, and I am thinking that today will be it. Other than going outside to feed the animals after sunrise, I don't plan on being outside much. The wind chills are going to be brutally cold, especially since we haven't had enough cold yet for our bodies to get acclimated to the colder temperatures. We remain, still (and forever, it seems), abnormally dry here. I keep thinking we'll get a good 2 or 3" rainfall that will pull us out of drought for at least a week or two. Sadly, it isn't happening. Obviously it won't happen this weekend because the forecasted rain/ice amounts are really low (and I'm okay with that). Our local TV met said last night that all the kids hoping for a snow day today were going to be disappointed, and that their best chance of having a snow day here will be Monday. It seems ludicrous that we're talking about snow days in November. We started this week with an 80 degree day and I guess we'll end it with a 30 or 32-degree night. That sort of sums up Oklahoma weather in a nutshell. Dawn

no where near window-opening weather yet lol :-( last night at 10:30pm it was still 82 outside and pretty humid even for us. today will be mid 90's, just like it pretty much has been since May. we have had cooler summer weather than the last 2 yrs thou, often having days in a row at upper 80's which is unheard of for summer for us (orlando). i am looking forward to cooler weather but not lower than 80 :-) i'm cold under 80 and actually already planning on winter blankets ie. getting another electric blanket ~ liz

I’m not too far from cyn427 in suburban MD. We haven’t had any significant rain. Last year b/w mid-August and mid-October, we had 10” of rain. The same period this year in the DC area had .04”. I think that .04” bypassed us! I planted a number of shrubs/hydrangeas in the spring and have been doing my best trying to keep them watered and alive. The Farmers Almanac is predicting unseasonably cold winter with higher than normal precipitation for us. We shall see if that’s correct!