March Times On....

A new month, some old things happening.

Outside, for one: March may officially contain the first day of spring, but nobody's promisin' nuthin about that:

After a snowy Sunday and early Monday, the temperature will plummet again behind the storm Monday night back into the single digits. It will rebound Tuesday and Wednesday – likely even above freezing for the first time since Jan. 29.

But, after a messy couple of days with mixed precipitation, the cold Arctic air takes hold again.

Wednesday’s night’s low? 16 degrees.

Thursday’s high is forecast at 20 degrees before the thermometer drops again down to about 3 degrees overnight.

If that pattern of cold were to prevail say for the month’s remaining 24 days, that would be good enough for second place on the all-time list.

Second coldest March ever here, that is. And for me, it's not the cold outside that gets me the most, but the constant wet socks coming from wet floors in kitchen, office, and especially gym. A close second is the salt, that gets over EVERYTHING and goes halfway up my pantlegs from rattling through monstrous drifts. We stripped the kitchen floor today, and much of that job was removing the discoloration likely caused by salt reacting with the sealant Eleanor puts on it.

Yet did any of that stop me from grilling burgers on the patio tonight? Of course not:



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March also brought back deja vu of a once-very-sick kitty: Tazzer, now our oldest, was the baby of the family when I took my first trip to meet AOL friends, in Boston in March of 2001. I came home to him lying listless in a box, which was the precursor to a very bad time that resulted in 401K-draining surgery to remove a piece of string he'd swallowed.

Last night, he settled into a yarn box; this morning, he wouldn't eat hardly any of his noms, and horked what little he did eat before returning to the nest. I worried, but he somehow seemed okay. By afternoon he was preening in more obvious spots, and tonight he was as demanding about food as he usually is, and finished it (okay, I got him a Fancy Feast treat can). He may just be as sick of all the cold as everyone else is.

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We finished the day with a Netflixing of At Any Price, a Dennis Quaid-Zac Efron piece from a few years ago that we had no reason to like: a plot centering on agriculture and auto racing, and only two likable characters in the entire film (one of whom- Quaid's wife- goes all Lady Macbeth on him at the end). And yet we liked it anyway. Makes about as much sense as Arctic temperatures in March.