Up Scope!

Two weekends since Christmas in which it didn't rain.

I know this because I used both of them for tree-felling. I badly need to replace two fenceposts snapped around Christmastime in high winds¹ but for the next eight weeks the ground was frozen solid (I possess no heavy plant or dynamite to deploy in such situations) and after that the ground rapidly became and remains to this day the consistency of overly-runny chocolate pudding. Fence-posts installed in such ground will simply fall over again at the first moderate gust of wind.

Every day the heavens open. Last week the temperature rose to a balmy 70 degrees or so for about three hours, with the net result that the pool cover, drained the night before but bearing a foot of water in the little pocket that forms to catch the rain every bloody day by the time I got back from work the next evening, in a trice became an incubator for an estimated four gazillion mosquito larvae (the sort with a breathing tube sticking diagonally out of their rear end. Do these things have left/right buttock tube ratios? Mutations from the stage-right affair normally seen? I digress). I was eaten alive as I attempted to reposition the syphon so I could drain another 15 gallons into the lawn (some of which has actually drowned).

I think I know the reason the weather has been so abominable of late. There can only be one explanation for all this wet.

My 401K administrator must have heavily invested my money² in New York Drought Futures.

1. An event that had me leaping about in the early hours of the morning in inadequate amounts of clothing applying emergency two-by-fours to hold up the fence and prevent further post snappage. A fence in post failure mode behaves much like a school assembly full of children in which one of them throws up; urgent action must be taken to avoid a cascade of unpleasantness as a runaway chain reaction develops↑
2. What little is left after the Dotcom Debacle, the Enron Fiasco and the Sub-Prime Mortgage Cock-up↑