Spring is coming. I can feel it at the genetic level: the domestic genes I inherited from my mother have activated themselves in the past three days. Normal thoughts of house maintenance have given way to dreams of spring cleaning, rearranging, and item-tossing. As a result I've caught myself resembling my cats, prowling around the house and looking for a mess to dip my hands into.

I hung new things in the hallway. Finally moved my bits of clothing from the bureau to the dresser, so as to give Jeff more room. (How odd is it that he needs more room for clothing than I do?) Started working on excavating the kitchen table. Day two of working on the kitchen.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll tackle the horrid mess that is the reading room. I'm still pondering painting the master bedroom blue. I want to—desperately—but the bedroom needs more work before that can happen.

For lack of a coherent entry, I thought I'd ramble a bit…

I never quite found a way to believe that my little blue planet took the opportunity of wintertime to point away from the Sun, not until I looked up one icy, sunny winter day and saw the rainbows. Every year after that, they came back, like the ice, my silent friends of wintertime afternoons. Only in midwinter was the sunlight angled correctly to stream in through the picture window, where it would be refracted through the cut-glass panes of my mother's coffee table.

If you looked up, straight ahead, toward the kitchen, you would see the horizontal rainbows splayed against the ceiling. They would show up first as white globs of light, then sharpen into rainbows, and then quietly fade over the course of the afternoon.

On the days of ice storms, they gave me something else to watch besides the glass-sculpture world outside the window.

Should I be so blasé about tornadoes? Perhaps not, but any inclinations toward reasonability that I might have are generally blown away (pardon the bad pun) by the ignorance and histrionics of the local weather forecasters.

Don't get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for tornadoes. I remember the one that touched my parents' house when I was a child. A house a mile away was blown to bits, but all it did to our house was delicately lift the cap off of the chimney and set it down in the yard. I've seen tornadoes ravage my home state, seen friends' houses destroyed, spent time frantically calling friends to find out if they and their families were okay.But I only get upset or worried when there's a need to get upset or worried.

This snippet of text, taken from a satirical column in the Huntsville Times, sums our one of our local weather forecasters up well:

Rather ironic, the rain returning. Just what I needed; an excuse to settle in and write, with cats and spouse tucked into bed earlier than usual, and a movie whose finishing hinges upon the return of my normal attention span.

It crept up, slow and steady, as the day went by. Any southerner knows it—the traditionally blue sky dulled to a white haze by the low-lying clouds. The heat of the day triggers these storms; they come in late afternoon and early evening. If they clear before sundown, the result is a soupy, humid mire; if the storms continue past sundown, some actual cooling-off takes place.

Running errands at two p.m. in the atmospheric soup left me breathless and sweaty. I went home, changed clothing per Kat's instructions, and met up for the casual Wednesday night dinner at the wondergeeks' apartment.

Which, to my almost-total surprise, turned out to be neither casual nor at the wondergeeks.

Nothing like a good spot of thunderstorms to turn a perfectly good day into a sodden one, no?

Kat and I went out to run errands this afternoon—and managed, once again, to get caught in a sudden rainstorm. This one was worse than usual; after making our purchases at Kroger, we stopped in amazement as the winds howled harder and harder. The rain wasn't falling, it was being blown across the parking lot in sheets.

Sushi leads to somnambulatory domesticats.

A day of chores and errands shifted course at four p.m., when the phone rang. "We are craving sushi. You should come with us." I hung up, made quick arrangements, and met up with the crew for a 5:30 dinner date.

I only know of two places in Huntsville that serve decent seafood. Both are, in essence, equal quality. However, in the past, Edo's has taken over 45 minutes to bring me a simple order of nigiri sushi. On the other hand, Miyako is less glacial and has dollar sushi nights on Mondays.

To Miyako we went, where I downed variously small and tasty tidbits of barely-deceased tuna, salmon, shrimp, and other fish I shan't name in the name of decency. Plus rice, and miso, and plenty of ice water.