The Gloom Index

Those "Best Places to Live" people have now come up with a gloom index, ranking major U.S. cities on cloud cover, hours of daylight, and days with precipitation in November, December and January.  Woo-hoo, we win! Seattle and Portland are #1 and #2 on the list of 50 cities.

Statistically, November 19th is the wettest day of the year in Seattle, raining 72% of the time since 1945. From the looks of that satellite loop, tomorrow should not disappoint.

What a sad sight. Clearing out the tangled mess of suckers around the base of the fig tree is one of the worst jobs on the homestead in the fall. Akin to cleaning out the chicken coop, if I had one. Trees send up base suckers when they're stressed and over the years, we've sure tortured the heck out of the top.

But it was dry midday Sunday, and felt good being outside doing anything. It's been relatively warm so far, and we're into that November false spring, when plants get tricked into growing. The birds and insects are still busy. I've always loved these lines from The Waste Land:

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

T.S. Eliot 

Other than the usual weather complaints, it was a good weekend. We had dinner with old friends on Sunday. On Saturday, we found a swivel desk chair (the naugahyde was peeling off my old one) that actually fit in the door of our small house.  Most office chairs are big enough for the Supreme Court, or could hold a 300-pound bombastic politician. Hum.  I'll leave it at that.