Tuesday, December 29, 2015

My Weather App is Fired

I am deleting the weather app on my phone, the one I check 2-3-10 times a day! The one where I follow Hawaii weather, Oregon forecasts, and devotedly hang on every hope and hint of rain or snow, anywhere in California. It's an awful app. It's wrong 72.9% of the time, and a bit off the rest of the time. Rain may be falling, but my weather app shows sunshine. It may be hot as July, but my weather app shows fog moving in. Why have I been so forgiving? Why have I been so blind?

The last straw blew in over the weekend when we awoke to howling winds. The wind literally on all fours, and wailing like a hairy beast on the hunt. Things were crashing around the yard, doors were slamming in the house. I envisioned the chickens, who insist on roosting high on a support cable just beneath the open-air roof of the run, and I imagined them featherless, strewn and disheveled. Geoff threw the switch on the garden lights, as I pulled on my boots, and that's about the time we heard the loudest crash, a ripping searing event. Downstairs, and out the kitchen door, I met Alex, our eyes were wide open, and what we saw made our hearts fall. That beast of (an unforecasted) wind raised the genuine inauthentic Viking tent, pulled up and snapped stakes, and flipped all of it across the lawn. The base frames snapped at the dowels. The screws for the A-frames twisted. It could have been worse. The dragon is safe, the A-frame wood is fine. The canvas is intact. We surveyed the damage, watching our heads for more flying debris, then tugged and wrestled with the canvas ties, to free the tent from the frame. The wind was as ferocious as ever, the canvas was as taut as a sail, ready to be driven off, again!

And the chickens? Those looney chooks clung to the shade cloth, stuck firm to that cable, turned their beaks into the weather and cackled like mad hens! They didn't give a fig or a feather, and the only thing ruffling their feathers was me, when I tried to pick them up, to protect them. I am keeping those crazy chickens, but the weather app has got to go!

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