Last Gasp of Winter
We are forecast to approach freezing tomorrow morning, and not much warmer on Saturday. The ferals are in catspace to stay warm. The pollen count has been at about 75% of the maximum for the past week, so I have been sneezing and coughing every time I go outside.
In addition to the pollen we have had dense fog for several days as the high, low, & dew point merged. The system that is blocking Interstates from Kentucky to the East Coast has been pulling in warm, moist air from the Gulf which gave us temperatures in the low 70s with 100% humidity. There was little actual rain, but things were just as damp as if there had been.
The 10 day forecast looks like temperatures are finally returning to normal and my utility bill will drop down to a reasonable range from the ionosphere of the last two months.
Sunday morning at 2AM we are shifting to Daylight Saving Time. I don’t want to save daylight, I want to spend it on warming things up!
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Pollen here is forming snowdrifts… ugh. Basically I’ve been sick for the past two months, either with the flu, a cold, or with these allergies being so bad I might as well be sick. Winter? I think we got a couple of days back in December, but I don’t know, I was in Louisiana when we supposedly had winter out here in the SF Bay area.
The West Coast was having one of its warmest Februarys on record, while the East Coast went the other way. This was very bad news for the California drought as there is minimal snow pack in the mountains. The locally heavy rains increased the level of a lot of reservoirs, but not enough to break the drought or make the situation much better. All it really did was to provide some more fuel for the wildfires.
If I find anything that works on the allergies I’ll post on it. I’m taking generic Zyrtec because it has the least offensive side-effects for me of the major allergy formulas. It makes things better, but it is no ‘silver bullet’.
It was nice to get a few days sleep not weighted down by wool blankets and cats.
I’m doing the generic Zyrtec too, as well as saline spray and, when things are really bad, a saline nasal irrigation pump. Sudafed will clear my nose for a couple of days but then rebound congestion kicks in and I can’t do it anymore. Same thing with decongestant spray. Grr.
last gasp of winter? isn’t that everybody said about the previous cold spell?
and when the cats aren’t all huddled up into a mass of cat-warmth to fight off the cold, they’re all sneezing at the pollen. sometime they’re all piled up on top of me, alternately kneading me with their sharp little claws or sneezing on me. and I’ve found a remedy for my sneezing – you can’t sneeze when there’s 50 or 100 pounds of cat piled on top of you. 😈
actually, I’ve found the saline nose and sinus rinsing to be better than drugs, but only if I do it every day, preferably at least twice a day.
I have the same problem with Sudafed which I only use when I have a really bad sinus headache or on the increasingly rare occasions when I have to fly.
I’ll try the saline, which I haven’t done in a very long time – it can’t hurt.
I look at the long range forecasts, Hipparchia, and it really looks like we are shifting back to the normal temps for at least the next week after this clears out. Previously we have been shifting between warm and cold for three days at a time. I think Excise’s allergies are worse than mine. I just wish he would stop sneezing on my screen.
The azaleas are budding and the robins are being annoying, so Spring is arriving.
BadTux, you remember what Mark Twain said about the coldest winter… I’ve been to SF twice, each time for a week or two in “summer,” and I have to agree with him.
We’re having crazy things like a 35°F temp shift within a calendar day, and yes, it was forecast to freeze here yesterday (?) but the 3-day history from NWS shows it did not. As with your rain, Bryan, it might as well have frozen here, for how cold it felt subjectively.
Oh, and having been invited up to my easy chair once in the middle of last night, Esther has now commandeered the chair for her own exclusive use… sweet cat until you try to displace her from a warm chair!
Steve, it’s 75F today here in Santa Clara. My attic fan is on. If it gets any warmer I’ll turn on the big 48″ fan in the back room, which exhausts through the patio screen door, but I try not to do that because it drags bugs and small children though my screens.
The flowers like it though…
Regarding the saline irrigation, the real problem is that it’s time consuming and annoying compared to popping a Zyrtec. So I prefer not to do it unless I have to do it. But it’s now what I do before resorting to Sudafed.
We dipped just below freezing the last 2 nights, but it is starting to warm up. There were days I wished it would snow because it subjectively felt warmer than that miserable mess we have had around here, mostly from the humidity being 100% and my feet getting wet.
Be happy Esther doesn’t take over your bed when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. That has happened to me a couple of times lately with Property and Excise.
Nice flowers, Badtux, and I’m hoping for some of your temperatures sometime soon.
I can imagine the irrigation being a hassle, but you do what you have to.
They’re ice plants, Bryan. A succulent. They neither need nor want much irrigation. Ice plants are an invasive non-native from South Africa, but this particular variety isn’t very invasive, and makes a *lot* of flowers. They wouldn’t do well in your climate at all though. If they get too much water they rot.
Ice plants were the ground cover of choice for the freeways in San Diego, but I never saw them flower. They might be a different variety.
Prickly pear is about the only succulent that survives around here, even then, only in almost pure sand.
The freeway kind of ice plants do flower, Bryan, but their flowers are orange and they don’t make many flowers. This particular breed of ice plant is called “Golden Shower” and makes a *lot* of flowers, a ton in early spring like now, and then a second showing that’s a bit sparser in late summer. It also doesn’t sprawl like the freeway kind of ice plants, it’s semi-erect, which is why it’s not ridiculously invasive like the freeway kind of ice plants.
Given the lack of water, it seemed incumbent upon me to replace the most water-thirsty parts of my landscaping with something that could tolerate long periods without water. Actually, there wasn’t anything planted in that flower bed when I moved in. I put the ice plants there with the vague idea they wouldn’t need a lot of care and were perennials so I wouldn’t need to be digging in the flower bed all the time. I guess I was right.
They look like they are very happy with the location and soil.
Many of the standard plants that have been sold for years down here have been failing because of the extended cold that we are now experiencing, as well as the increase in rain year round. We have even had years without acorns because the cycle for the oaks have been interrupted.