nlbarber

The breezy weather Fay brought us abruptly disappeared this afternoon, as I discovered when I emerged from Target into a humidity bath. I resorted to the car A/C as I drove to the grocery store, and again on the way home.

While still putting up the groceries I got a call from nephew, asking if he could come help make his chosen birthday dessert: strawberry squares. This will be for the family dinner Tuesday night, his actual birthday--some different concoction will be made for the birthday party. (Cake, probably, though he was thinking hard about strawberry shortcake, with hot fudge topping for overkill. Or maybe that was just his other option for the family dinner....) Oh, and I agreed to make barbecued ribs for Tuesday night. Must remember to tell my supervisor I will work from home Tuesday, so I can start the ribs early enough.

Anyway, we started on the strawberry squares with the crumb crust/topping, and while that was baking a fairly hard rain shower started. And then stopped, too quickly, but it was hard enough to penetrate the leaf canopy in my front yard at least a little. As we moved on to the stage of beating the strawberries, sugar, egg white, etc. into a fluffly pink mass, it rained again. (Or maybe it was the second try with the strawberry stuff--for the very first time, I overbeat the egg-white mixture and it deflated into thin pink soup.) Last steps on the strawberry squares were folding in whipped cream, spreading the strawberry mixture over most of the crumbs, and sprinkling the remaining crumbs on top, before sliding it into the freezer where it will keep easily until Tuesday.

The rain total might have been half an inch--I don't have a gage in the yard, but the closest ones I looked at show from a third to over a half inch for the late afternoon, adding to the tenths of inches Fay had given us over the last couple of days.

Drought hydrology isn't really my thing, though I somehow ended up doing some drought analysis a few years ago--mostly pulling together some data, and looking at what parameters might could be used for a semi-early-warning-system for a growing season drought. But all that passed, and other than answering questions about it from the cooperator every now and then, I haven't been working on droughts.

But now I'm going to have another spurt (not a good word for this, I guess) of drought stuff. At the end of April I'll be one of 2 people representing my office at a NIDIS Southeast Drought Workshop down in Peachtree City, Ga.--that's about an hour's drive from my house or office (more with traffic). NIDIS is the National Integrated Drought Information System--which I heard about for the first time today. Guess I'll be learning a good bit more, soon.

Tomorrow I'm going to a noon-through-dinner symposium on Drought: Science and Policy down at Georgia Tech. This one I asked to attend, partly because of the workshop next month, and partly because I do find this interesting even if it's not my field. I'm also helping a co-worker put up an exhibit--we're a sponsor for the symposium, it seems, and so they asked for an exhibit. Today. For a meeting tomorrow. Luckily I used drought as the focus for last fall's exhibit at the Sunbelt Agricultural Exposition, so we dug those materials out and that will be it. No time to update the hydrographs for the last 6 months of data--it will have to do as it is.