News stories over the past several days have focused on Hurricane Irene and her path up the East Coast. Hmmn ... "her"? Is that right? Should it be "its"? I'm just not up on proper hurricane pronoun usage - it's not something we ponder too frequently in northern Vermont. The frenzy of reporting has been crazy; I swear that within the space of 3 minutes I saw two different graphics on the tv this morning - one showing in bright pink how the "extreme weather" would overtake our state, and another showing the weather line at central Vermont, well south of us. What to believe?
Today was beautiful with sun and warm temperatures and barely a breeze, making it hard to believe that high winds are coming our way. I put all my potted plants down on the ground, off the benches and what-not that they're on, and took a few hanging things off the exterior of the house. And the garage got cleaned out so that our cars could go in. That's about the extent of our preparations.
If anything worries me, it's the heavy rains that are forecast. Our barn leaks like a sieve in many spots, and I'm worried what torrential rains will do to the hay that is stored up in the loft. After the extremely wet spring, there was a stretch of great weather for haying, and as a result, there's a ton of hay up in the barn. Would be a shame to lose a lot of it to mildew, or worse, for it to get sodden and heavy and stress the barn. The first bands of rain are supposed to start later tonight, so at this point it's a waiting game to see what happens.
Given the weather reports, the horses are due to stay in Sunday and possibly Monday. If the weather hasn't turned ugly by tomorrow morning, I may head to the barn early and put them out for a bit or give them some grazing time.
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