Weather and other crap...

Yes, it's another one of those miserable weather days... I should be glad I'm better off than Elayne Riggs, whose blog tells of the damage to her car from a branch sent flying by the strong wind bursts in her neck of the woods ( although she doesn't live in the woods, but in Brooklyn Bronx/Yonkers... ) I'm thankful, I guess that our trees are out back, along with most of the neighbors' trees. That does mean the house would get whacked it the wind takes a mind to knock something over, but not as much to break... It's raining and 60 some odd degrees out. Didn't somebody tell the folks in charge of weather that it's Winter? This is Spring weather - the nastiest of it, but spring weather. It's going to confuse the hell out of my plants!!!

It's days like these, you wonder how our ancestors managed to live as long as they did, considering the options they had to protect themselves from the weather. My 18th and 19th century ancestors lived to be in their 70s and 80s, well above the normal death age for the times. Not upper class either. My great-great-great-great-grandfather fought in the War of 1812 (he was born in 1779, in midst of the American Revolution, in North Carolina) as a sharp-shooter earning $6.66 a month. They had 6 children then and moved to Indiana after the war (probably with a government land grant, but I'm not certain of that) and settled there, where 8 more children were born, my great-great-great-grandmother among them. They raised their kids and my great-great-grandfather, as there's no record of his mother ever having married when he was born. She apparently didn't live as long as the others in the family as she disappears from the census record between 1850 and 1860. In the 1860 census, allthat was left of the family was my g-g-grandfather and his grandmother. She lived to be nearly 90 years old That seems pretty good for the time, living on a farm in what was the "frontier".

Just ruminating on the past, since that keeps me from doing what I should be doing here in the present...

UPDATE

At least on the weather front, so to speak... The rain has stopped, it's in the 60s and the wind (at least here in the burbs of NJ) has died down...On the other hand, I'm still avoiding things I should be doing. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, would I?

FURTHER AND FINAL UPDATE 3:04 p.m.

I give up. There's some psycho in charge of weather. The temperature has dropped to 45° since I lasty posted and the wind's picking up again and the sun seems to have vanished. If the Weather Wizard isn't in this (oh, Flash, where are you?), it's just downright weird... And since comic books villains are "fiction", I guess this qualifies as just downright weird...