Winter is knocking at the door

Winter is trying to make an appearance today. Well, it did make an appearance last night. My, were we frosty. I went out this morning and found a thick coating of frost on the car’s windshield and billows of steam came pouring out of my nose. That says winter to me. The old thermometer dropped down into the low 20s last night and hasn’t been able to creep out of the 30s today yet.

I started a fire in the stove last night and before long it was so hot in here I had to open the back door. The house is still 75° and that’s pretty toasty. This is the awkward heating phase where it’s not cold enough to have a fire burning all the time, yet cold enough that I need to nurse it along so that there are sufficient coals remaining at day’s end to start a new fire. Otherwise I’d be burning through kindling like nobody’s business. Still, not to complain. It’s almost December and I’ve hardly used any wood at all.

Meanwhile, in other weather news, there appears to be a huge storm developing along the southeastern coast of the US. It has all the hallmarks of a whopping nor’easter, but no one is calling it that yet. Is there a movement afoot to stop calling them that? Or do they only get to be called nor’easters once they’ve passed a certain north/south line in the sand? In any case, we’re just going to have a lovely weekend and I’ll have to spend some time figuring out how to stake down the tarps on the wood pile so I don’t end up with a batch of very wet wood. Rain is one thing, but driving horizontal rain is quite another. With approaching storms like this, I wish I had a wood shed.

And, unrelated to weather, while I was out this morning, I pulled into the Dunkin Donuts drive-up line to grab a cup of coffee. There was a young woman behind me who must have had her entire make-up kit laid out in her passenger seat. I got to watch her apply her eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, and eyelash curler. Then the blusher with the sponge, then the monster brush. Then she started with her lips. Good lord, I’ve never seen anyone take so long to smear lipstick on her face. She had three different tubes of lipstick that she applied with a wand thingy. A base coat of some kind. Then color and then another color. She painted and dabbed and sculpted some more. By the time I reached the drive-up window, her lips were as shiny as squeaky clean glass and the most arresting shade of blood red I have ever seen. I couldn’t help staring in my side view mirror. Truly, I have never seen such a display of performance art in my life. Maybe it’s just me, but she looked as if someone had punched her in the mouth and the rest of her features were lost to the glaring glossy blood colored lips. Yeeesh. And you know, I’d wager that after all that effort, half of it ended up on the rim of her coffee cup.