In which it is really entirely too damned nice outside.

The weather is gorgeous. Breezy, warm, balmy, just gorgeous. The lawns have turned emerald green in the past three days. I’m wearing a strappy backless hippy dress, people. It’s wonderful.

It also makes me fear for the upcoming summer. It’s only March and it’s acting like May which makes me think that May will feel like August… and August in the Midwest? Totally. SUCKS. ASS. (And not in the fun way!)

I’m devouring Otherland, one of the books my mom sent me. In hardback, even, which one would assume would be a more luxurious reading experience but in actual fact is unwieldy and irritating. (I can’t wait to start reading ebooks on a palmtop again; they’re lightweight, small, and backlit, bitches! Such a superior reading experience, when you’re a voracious reader. I mean, it’s not that I don’t dig an old musty tome when I’m in an Indiana Jones movie, but for general consumption the e-device is the way to go.)

The reviews at Amazon are divided between yum and suck, but I think it’s delicious. I devoured 500 pages over the weekend. I’d tell you all about it, but it’s such a broad story with so many characters that not even the professionals at the publishing house could write a decent jacket blurb. (The jacket blurb sucked, omfg, what a ramblingly unattractive piece of shit.) (The only reason I started reading the book in the first place was that it was not only over 700 pages long, but the first in a series of five and all were present in the boxes my mom sent. I’m always looking for a long-term reading relationship.) It’s cyberpunk. There’s a tiny little bushman character with an ! in his name. The descriptions of the future web are awesome and I want VR gear installed in my head, I totally do. Typing is so 21st century; wouldn’t it be cooler to simply gesture at icons in an all-enveloping, 3D scape?

Yes, it would totally be better!

I have a job, good books to read, and a new Pocket PC on the way via UPS. I’m so happy!

In other news, according to the bartender Aki, who is sitting in my living room chatting with Truck and Peach, Southern Comfort should be called “bitch whiskey” because that’s what it is. Hah!

In which it’s arrived. Winter. It’s totally here.

The weather’s turned, and the town’s slick with ice and snow. It’s doing a half snow/half rain thing right now, no wind, the flakes falling straight down and hitting the ground with an eerie and surrounding shhhrrrr sound.

I went to the grocery store with AmmZon earlier, and it took a long time to de-ice her car. The parking lot at the grocery store was slushy and slippery when we walked across it.

I’ve got the jeep running right now. It’ll probably take ten minutes or more before it’s de-iced enough for me to drive up to the bar so I can have a few smokes inside, where it’s warm. I’ll take a book, of course, and drunk people will give me shit about it, saying clever things like, “What’re ya doin’?!” and “I can’t believe you can read in here!”

I think I should get props for not replying, “It’s called reading, you imbecile,” or “It would be much easier if you’d shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”

Sometimes drunk people want me to tell them what the book I’m reading is about. Once in awhile, I actually do, and because I tend to read hard sci-fi I launch immediately into descriptions of particle physics and watch their eyes glaze over. That teaches ’em. Heh.

In which the mild is over.

I just saw a girlfriend and sat in my car chatting with her while I wolfed down an extremely late lunch of two crispy bean tacos and fresh-squeezed lemonade. We traded gossip. I had two bits of gossip, neither very juicy, and she didn’t really have any, but we still managed to solve the relationship problems of two of our friends in one fell swoop.

The point is not that we’re geniuses, which we are, but that in the time I sat there my back and ass became all damp and sweaty. Iowa’s sweet spring is over, and the muggy, hot, sticky, dank, sweaty season has begun.

Living in Iowa is all about bitchin’ about the weather.

In other news, there’s a freakin’ tornado watch for my county until ten o’clock tonight. Apparently the current weather closely resembles 1985’s shitty tornado season:

The storm that produced over 100 reports of severe weather yesterday will hit the Midwest this afternoon and evening with another round of severe weather. The situation is similar to the 1985 tornado outbreak where a closed low was diving southeast across the Great Lakes into a warm and humid air mass. This afternoon’s event is very similar in that the closed low over the northern Plains this morning will dive southeast across Minnesota and Iowa this afternoon. The air mass, while cloudy with left over showers this morning, will eventually turn out sunny with temperatures climbing into the 80s and dew points soaring into the 60s ahead of the cold front. The main threat area will be from southern Wisconsin through western Illinois into northern Missouri where supercell thunderstorms are forecast to develop late this afternoon. During the initial development stages of the storms and before the storms become a squall line, the supercells may produce quite a few tornadoes.

In other other news, if you use Firefox as your web browser, you should install Forecastfox because it not only displays the weather in the lower right-hand corner of your browser, but it notifies you whenever the NWS issues a watch or warning. Which is way cool.