I know. It is awful. At least this week's storms likely will not bring heavy precipitation, but there will be some cold. I need to go to the store today and stock up on rawhide chew bones for the dogs. Nothing is worse than a bored dog who is underfoot and giving you those "I am so bored" looks and sighs. Hope this week's precipitation blows through fast.

bumping this down the page

Jennifer, I'm glad you got rain. I know that you needed it. I was looking at our tomato plants in pots around dinner time last night and thinking they needed water. Since heavy rainfall was in our forecast, I didn't water them but promised the plants I'd water them Saturday morning if the forecasted Friday rain missed us. It didn't miss us, so I won't have to water today....or for another week....or month. Larry, Water coming into the house? Wow. That's not good. I hope you find the source and can stop it from coming in. In terms of weather, we had it all last night and to a lesser extent it continues this morning, just without the wicked wind. There's been a ton of rainfall, thunder and lightning, wind gusting into the 60s, etc. The storms have been widespread but patchy, so some folks have more rain, and more damage, than others. We have roofs torn off buildings, trees down, power poles snapped in half, power lines down, power outages of course, and water, water, water everywhere. The hardest-hit areas for power outages seem to be to our south. Our power went out momentarily but came right back on and, of course, as with every single time it rains hard here, we lost the DirecTV and the internet for a while. I don't know what it looks like outside at our place because it still is dark, but we are surrounded by an ocean of water. I'm betting at least 3" of rain fell just based on the huge amount of water surrounding the house. We feel fortunate as there were tornadoes to our southwest, in particular just across the river a bit and down in Montague County, TX, where my dad grew up, which sits catty-corner to Love County's southwestern corner. The Bowie, TX, area got hit by one or more tornadoes, and the Burkburnett, TX, area had some of the largest hail I've ever seen--I don't even know how to describe it, perhaps cantaloupe-sized. The stones certainly were significantly larger than grapefruit sized. These hailstones in some instances punched through the homes' exterior roof and then came through the ceiling and into the actual rooms of the homes. Can you imagine? My parents had that exact same sort of damage to their roof and home when I was either 20 or 21 and living in my first apartment. I was there in Fort Worth at the time, but not at their house, and I remember taking my sister home to Arlington with me to spend the night because my parents' house was such a mess. They got essentially a whole new interior (drywall, insulation, carpet, drapes, bedspreads, etc.) and exterior (windows, siding, roof, etc.) after their baseball to softball sized hail pushed through their roof, walls and ceiling and some flooring that year after the interior suffered damage from water and debris. The issue was that everyone else was in the same boat, so it was hard to find roofers and construction workers and many people's homes went a year or more before they were fully repaired and restored to normal. Last night, down in Texas they had ridiculously slow-moving storms and heavy flash flooding to our south, and then more damage on the TX side of the river to our southeast that could be tornado damage or straight-line wind damage. Some people in our county think their storm damage came from a tornado, and maybe it did, but I never saw anything on our radar that looked like a tornado, at least not after it crossed the river into OK. We had a lot of storm spotters out and some of them reporting some lowering of the clouds and also rotation in various places, but I don't know if any of them reporting a tornado on the ground. If they did, I missed it. Last night wasn't even supposed to be our best chance for heavy rainfall, but we got it anyway. Our best chance for heavy rainfall, if the forecast doesn't change, is Sunday. I don't know where we'll put more water. Dawn

I see a few planted loblollys while driving north along Rt 220 in Bedford Co, PA just north of the MD/PA line. They tried planting Scots pines in places in my area long ago, but all dead from pine wilt nematode, although I did see a few surviving mature Scots pines in neighborhoods near Altoona, PA with their striking orangish bark. Here's my loblolly several years ago -- much bigger now. The smaller ponderosa pine had to be cut because it was suffering so badly from needlecast. Pond pine just recently, close relative of loblolly. Hard to tell the difference. I also grow longleaf pine. All these SE pines have no trouble w/z6 cold per say, but can suffer from ice/wet snow. Finally, the Eisenhower loblolly on the Augusta, GA Masters golf course, but was badly damaged in an ice storm some years ago & had to be cut down.