Back to the Frozen North

Spring in the air? Kinda sorta — after last night's
chill today's sunny 46 felt positively tropical.

Serendipity took me to Texas via North Carolina just as winter storm Saturn spun in from the Ohio Valley.

Somewhere in the Gaylord Texan
 is a restaurant named Old
Hickory — highly recommend for that
once-in-a decade spendy but
sublime porterhouse steak. 

Air traffic control put a "ground stop" on Philly so we were diverted to Charlotte, N.C., to sidestep and/or hurdle the growing storm. It took getting up at 4:45 am to get that early flight at 7:30 (eventually 8 am) to get ahead of the bad weather, another hour or two, and outbound flights were being canceled.

Didn't expect to end up in the
Gaylord Texan — last was here
in 2004, but a surprise dinner
reservation allowed for a major
digression from the nutritional
discipline of the entire last year.

Speaking to Marg the next morning she told me there was 8 inches on the ground since nightfall. Hard to believe in the Texas sun that just a few hours before I'd been in the frigid North, except that I now had this winter coat on my arm that was dead weight.

Fast forward another day and the sunlight of Dallas and Charlotte were erased and replaced with the snow-covered fields of LaGuardia Airport and it's hopefully cleared-by-now runways. From shirtsleeves to fleece hood in a few hours. Surreal.

The next day,
at Charlotte Douglas Airport, Brookwood
Farms' Carolina Pit BBQ "Patty's Pounder"
took care of subverting all my efforts to eat
healthy the last two days. Nevvamind,
sometimes you just gotta go with the flow 

Well, still recovering from bronchitis, at least I'd have a good excuse to light a fire in the hearth tonight. I had some splits of Sandy wood that had already dried to 10-15 percent that I had re-split and dried the last few percent indoors, and some faster hot-burning birch to mix with it to ensure a good burn.

It took a bit of tending and rearranging and a little extra kindling to burn it all the way, but for a fireplace fire, this one warmed the downstairs extremely well, keeping the oil furnace at bay for a few hours.

If today's sunny turnaround is any barometer of the banishment of the groundhog's ill tidings, with a bit of luck, we won't need to light too many more of these.

Birch and dried maple from
Hurricane Sandy. Moisture content from driest, fresh split faces already
reading 10-15% (extra drying indoors
for good measure)

DFW: view from the SkyLink
station in Terminal E.