We've had 3 days of rain and it looks like we're going to have 3 more...good for my new plants and all that mulch! We call my Mom the Weather Lady. It’s become an obsession of hers. In fairness, she’s an avid gardener and still volunteers at a local park with beautiful gardens at least once a week (big-wig there), so weather is important to her. If you want to know what the weather will be like today, or even a week out, call her. When we lived in Columbus we got updates all the time when the weather was turning bad and I always knew when it was time to grab the kids and head for the basement (she was appalled our community didn’t have tornado sirens). We live about 3 ½ hours due East of her now, but if the weather is coming from her direction, trust me, she knows when the storm will be reaching us here in Pittsburgh. She has a fancy electronic weather machine outside that gives her digital readouts indoors, but her favorite forecaster is the 24/7 local radar cable TV channel with the electronic/computer generated voice giving you updates. Here we only get ‘The Weather Channel’ and it drives her nuts when she visits that she had to wait until the local on the 8’s.

When we moved here my parents gave me a Weather Alert system (they have one of these too…or maybe ‘two’…gotta have one upstairs and down). My Dad programmed it for me (I still haven’t programmed my VHS). You put it in your bedroom and can input different counties around you and program it to blast an alarm and details for any kind of weather (it’s only woken me up twice as I don’t care about the severe thunderstorms or floods up on my hill…just tornado’s, volcano eruptions, and glaciers coming my way, thank you very much). There’s a button you can push to get the NationalWeatherCenter weather (24/7 of course) for your county too…I just look outside. I’m getting her one of these for her birthday and I'm going to have it personalized with her name…just trying to decide between the wall hung version or the stand-alone for her garden...tough decision.

My DH is a weather nut too, but for different reasons…when we moved here one of the local channel’s had a cute little locally grown weather gal on it in the mornings and I soon noticed he had a preference for that channel (midlife-crushes are so cute don't you think?). Well a year or so back the gal left for a station in Texas…DH was in mourning for a year…this year she came back to the Pittsburgh station as Chief Meteorologist…they had countdown commercials advertising her coming back…I’m telling you, you would have thought she was reporting pigs were flying or it was really raining cats and dogs he was so attentive (can’t remember what I said a minute ago, but ask him when the weather is on…she’s now on 3 times every evening)! No one can report the 4 months of ‘Snow’, ‘Snow’, and more ‘Snow’ like that gal! I swear she’ll make it to ‘The Weather Channel’ one day and then DH (and most of the men in Pittsburgh) will be in heaven…..hours and hours of Julie Bologna…LOL. I found out she wrote a book "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Extreme Weather." I might get it for DH (fitting title), but it better have pics...he’ll be looking for the centerfold (too bad it's of cloud formations).