Those of you in the areas where wintery precipitation is forecast now have been upgraded to a Winter Weather Advisory that is in effect from 6 pm tonight to 6 am 11/23/2013. There's not a lot you can do to protect your plants from any ice that may fall, but mulch will help protect their root systems.Y'all be careful and stay safe.

Bill and I were explaining to the kids the various forms of icy precipitation this morning over breakfast. I have a suspicion we're going to get very cold over the next few days. We have been seriously wet in our spot, this year.

We picked up 2 ricks of cedar this year. We store a few days wood indoors. Smells so nice! Burns fast, though.

I'll be rising sweet rolls and bread loafs when the storm hits. Gotta make the best of an 'awful situation', ya know. hehe

Bon, I love baking when the weather is bad outside. Gotta have something yummy to eat when you're drinking hot cocoa!

Down here, being so far south, the earlier forecasts had the cold weather hitting us Sunday night, so we were not included in yesterday morning's Special Weather Statement. Then, late yesterday, they added a handful of southcentral OK counties, including mine, to the area covered by the Special Weather Statement. I was so disappointed, but noticed that while NWS-Norman had included us in the area that was likely to receive freezing precip, NWS-Fort Worth had not yet issued anything for the Texas counties across the river from us. I took that as a good sign.

So, guess what happened? NWS-Norman dropped those southcentral counties from the area likely to have much, if any, freezing precip in this first way of storms. We didn't have the Special Weather Statement in effect any more, and weren't included in the Winter Weather Advisory. But, NWS-Fort Worth issued a Special Weather Statement for the counties across the river from us, including the one that surrounds our part of the county on three sides.

The best I can guess is that we are not likely to have any freezing precip here until at least Sunday. On the other hand, it could happen,. We're right along the line where it is a maybe thing. I think that you're squarely in the middle of whatever is about to happen, so I am glad y'all are prepared.

Our early morning low temperature this morning was 59, and the snakes are out today. I just saw a little chicken snake near the front porch about 15 minutes ago. I'm not sure if they're looking for a last good meal before it gets real cold, or if they are looking for a warm place to seek shelter. Either way, the greenhouse is open for air flow and I hope they don't go into it. If they do, they won't last long because it gets colder in there at night than they likely could tolerate.l

I love snow, but am not a big fan of sleet, freezing rain and hail. It is incredibly rare for us to get snow this far south this early in the year. I think we have had snow flurries twice in November in 15 years, and I don't know if we've ever had sleet or freezing rain in November. I'm watching the noon news and waiting to see what the meteorologist says.

Either way, with the cold temperatures and the wind, it is going to be unpleasantly cold, wet and windy even if we don't get freezing stuff.

I don't know if y'all still have a lot of leaves left on trees up there, but down here, there's still a lot of oak trees that haven't lost their leaves yet, and a few other types as well. That means freezing rain would be really serious because all those leaves, when coated with ice, would be really heavy and might bring down tree limbs or entire trees.

I still have some green plants in the garden, mostly herbs, but also Laura Bush petunias and verbena bonariensis. They might not be green after this weekend.

Dawn

Dawn;

I know you don't like the cold stuff, but I do hope you get plenty of precipitation. It's freezing now! At the time you were writing this we were driving to the grocer to fill empty shelf areas and add some fresh flour and yeast. We unloaded the bed of the truck beneath light freezing rain and 15mph winds.

It's going to be really nasty here come Sunday! I can see the ice forming from a distance atop the drive way at the fire department next door. Bill decided to add more wood since the cedar splits so easy.

The leaves finally dropped this week and I didn't have time to rake! Well, we don't have any oak just peeKan, slippery elm and poplar. I just can't get over how nice it was to actually have leaves on the ground. I don't remember the last time autumn was so lengthy and enjoyable, either. This kids were really wanting to play in leaf piles, too.

Bon, I expect it will get pretty miserable here on Sunday too. I think our worst weather at this end of the state will be Sunday and Monday.

Right now our temperature is hovering at 33 degrees, but most of the rain has moved on...not that much fell, a little over a tenth of an inch, but any rain is good. I can see more rain on the Texas radar to our southwest but when it gets about a county away from us, it vanishes. That's the story of our year---rain vanishes when it gets close to us. I won't mind if the ice vanishes before it reaches us though. (grin)

For the rest of the weekend, the weather is expected to be about the same as it is right now---with temperatures here hovering in the low 30s and rain coming through in little waves. The issue will be whether the rain falls while we are at 32 or below or if if falls when we are 33 degrees or higher.

Thursday was an odd day. We had snakes out in the yard, which I'm never happy about, but it was oddly warm for this late in November. We made it up to 69 degrees before the cold front rolled in and dropped us about 30 degrees in three hours. Earlier in the day, when walking past the garden on my way back from the mailbox, I saw a watermelon in the garden. How I have missed seeing it before now is beyond me, but it looked whole and intact, so I brought in the mail (so it wouldn't blow away) and went out to the garden to pick the watermelon. We have been down as low as 19 degrees, so I figured it was rotted on the bottom, perhaps, and only looked good on the top. I picked it from the dead vine, and it was whole and intact. How crazy is that?

After carrying the melon inside, I cut it in half, expecting the flavor to be poor because we had so much rain in October and early November. If the flavor was poor, I was going to feed it to the chickens. Nope. The flavor was good. In fact, it was great, so I celebrated the survival of the watermelon by eating some of it, and saving the rest for other family members. Then I carried the rind out to the chickens and they happily picked it clean of any remaining bits of red flesh.

Enjoying a slice of the 'Harvest Moon' watermelon in the final hours before a brutal cold front arrived was a fittingly weird end to a weird growing season. The plant itself had roamed and rambled around the garden before the freeze got it, and had produced plenty of melons in the summer months, but none in the fall. I never thought it would have produced a melon so late in fall that would survive several freezing nights. I likely didn't see it before because cosmos and zinnias sort of surrounded the part of the plant where this melon was. Still, I walk by the garden every day on my way to the mailbox and I do generally look at it as I go by, and I still don't know why I didn't see the melon before now. Harvest Moon was probably my best producer in terms of pounds of melons this summer, although Yellow Doll produced a larger number of melons per plant. It is just that Yellow Doll is a really small melon.

I hope y'all stay warm and safe up there, and that the ice misses your place, or at least that it melts quickly. Our driveway is a long, gentle, uphill slope, so when ice falls, we sometimes have problems getting up or down the driveway without sliding off of it. That is reason enough (I think) to stay home when it is icy, but Tim and Chris both are pigheaded and try to make that long drive to work in Dallas despite the ice.

I've been waiting for a quiet day to sit and flip through the seed catalogs, and I am thinking that today will be it. Other than going outside to feed the animals after sunrise, I don't plan on being outside much. The wind chills are going to be brutally cold, especially since we haven't had enough cold yet for our bodies to get acclimated to the colder temperatures.

We remain, still (and forever, it seems), abnormally dry here. I keep thinking we'll get a good 2 or 3" rainfall that will pull us out of drought for at least a week or two. Sadly, it isn't happening. Obviously it won't happen this weekend because the forecasted rain/ice amounts are really low (and I'm okay with that). Our local TV met said last night that all the kids hoping for a snow day today were going to be disappointed, and that their best chance of having a snow day here will be Monday. It seems ludicrous that we're talking about snow days in November. We started this week with an 80 degree day and I guess we'll end it with a 30 or 32-degree night. That sort of sums up Oklahoma weather in a nutshell.

Dawn

It is 33 here and we don't have as much wind as much of the State, but the wind chill is 26. A car drove off a high bluff and into the lake here, so law enforcement and fireman have been working out in the cold all day.

The helicopters have been in the area until just a few minutes ago and Tulsa Channel 6 has been showing pictures on their website.

I'm not much of a breakfast eater and Al is. He had gone to eat breakfast at a little lakeside cafe this morning and someone came running in to tell him that a car had gone into the lake (probably during the night). He told them to call the Sheriff and the fire department. He had driven right by it on his way there without noticing that the guard rail was down, but by the time he left, lots of emergency vehicles had answered the call. GRDA has verified that there is a car down there. It was over a high bluff and I think into a very deep part of the original river. I sometimes go there on my jet ski and it is a long way up from the surface of the water to the road above. I feel sorry for divers today.

Carol

I hope everyone is okay. I trust the emergency responders are doing everything they can. I don't see well any more. The only accident I've ever had occurred when the heater coil burned up in the truck and my windows were not defogged sufficiently. Even then, everyone was okay. I just don't drive it any more with our old vehicle.

Dawn, we've been wet ever since the last post. I'm not a desert rat, per se, but this is just more moisture than I'm familiar. I bet my garlic is groaning.

The temp is right on the freezing line dipping above and below freezing giving a mixture of sleet and rain. I suppose it'll all be frozen over night if the temps stay low.

This belongs to US National Weather Service in Norman and an awesome visual guide for my kids to climatic profile for the various precipitations.

Vertical Profile for Winter Precipitation

I saw this accident on the news this morning, very sad deal with three fatalities. Everyone be safe and drive carefully!

Carol, I immediately thought of you and Al when I saw that news story....and that was early in the afternoon on the day that they were searching the lake for the vehicle. I checked the news channels' websites every couple of hours after that to see if anything new had developed. What an awful story that is! I really felt sorry for the dive team having to be in the water in such brutal conditions. The families of those three people must be in such immense shock and pain.

Bon, All we really have had so far is rain---about 8/10s of an inch, so I am a pretty happy camper. It fell really lightly and slow and for a long time it was so light that it didn't seem to be adding up to much in the rain gauge, but late yesterday the rainfall picked up a bit and fell harder. We might have had tiny bits of freezing rain at times yesterday, because you could see a little ice on the foliage of some trees and shrubs, but there wasn't any ice on the streets, bridges or even on the porch steps. Our temperature fluctuated all day yesterday between 31 and 33, so I feel lucky we didn't have a big issue with sleet or freezing rain. Today was much warmer. It got all the way up to 40 degrees. The weather trouble is likely to come tomorrow or Monday.

Tim and Chris are at work and will be hurrying home in a few hours, hoping to arrive home before the roads get too bad. Luckily, they are off for the next couple of days, so no one in our family will have to go out into the weather unless we get a fire call. It goes without saying that sometimes we get really busy on icy or snowy days, and some days it is really quiet despite the inclement weather. I am hoping for quiet for the next couple of days.

Mia, I hope it doesn't get too bad there in the city. At this point in time (and forecasts can change), it looks like SW OK and western North Texas may get the worst of this storm. We are barely west of I-35, so maybe the worst weather will stay further west than we are.

Y'all, I think that if we have to put up with snow arriving roughly a month earlier than is typical, then we ought to be rewarded by having spring arrive a month early in 2014.

We are in the area that is forecast to get 2 to 3" of sleet and snow. Since our weather is obstinate and seems to deliberately do the opposite of what is forecast, I'm hoping we won't get any at all. (There's nothing wrong with hoping!)

I harvested most of the rest of the catnip yesterday. It still was green and putting out new growth, but is likely to be blackened and limp after ice or snow falls on it. So, for the last couple of days, the cats have been having a catnip party.

Mike, If you see this, since the greenhouse isn't heated, I brought the citrus trees inside. They've been spending the days in the sunroom and the nights in the breakfast room.

It seems odd to have ice and snow when we still have trees with lots of leaves on them, including some trees whose leaves still are green.

Dawn

Oh my. It is a winter wonderland outside. We got ice Friday and this is much better. I don't know how much snow it is, but it's at least an inch, probably more like two.

Leslie

Leslie, I was watching the weather this morning and hoping your winter wonderland was as beautiful in person as it seemed likely to be based on the radar. I hope it is a moister snow that melts down to a decent amount of moisture for the ground to soak up instead of the drier type that doesn't melt down to much.

So far the winter weather is mostly is a bust here----only rain (yay!) a couple of days ago, and the tiniest bit of sleet and freezing rain here today. I'm not complaining. Our dewpoint stayed so low today that a lot of what was falling was evaporating before it hit the ground. I hope our luck holds for one more day.

Dawn

We had a low here Friday morning of 18 which was the lowest we have seen this fall so far. Had 4 inches of snow Friday and another 1 1/2 inches this morning. Didn't blow too bad. Hopefully it got cold enough to kill the Kochia weeds. Also still had green leaves on some of my trees. We missed all of the ice but have had some snow packed roads. It got warm enough today to melt them off. They are all clear now. Looks like we may warm up for a while. Jay

Hey dawn. Glad you got your citrus moved in. I've been harvesting lemons for weeks now. Made a great pie!!

Mike