A while back I saw this on Instagram …

and it resonated … a lot.

So I googled around and found enough similar images to make a stab at it … because “when you’re not hungry, but you eat because your mouth is lonely” is the best explanation I’ve ever found for why I find myself wandering into the kitchen … again and again.

The Long Arc of Summer patch was dreamed up on a Texas summer’s eve as we watched Griffin shagging high fly balls launched by his dad.

It may have been early May, but summer in Texas is a six-month affair, stretching from May to October, leaving a scant two months each for the other seasons of the year. If we’re lucky …

Austin Kleon’s newsletter on April 23rd included a love note to paper dictionaries. And I quite agree with him, but I confess that I rarely use my trusty 1970s vintage Merriam-Webster Collegiate (received in 1974 as a high school graduation gift). These days I prefer to use m-w.com …

Even when it’s a word I know how to spell, I very much like to double-check definitions … and perhaps find an even more apt word in the list of synonyms (who needs a thesaurus?)

Here, for instance, is what I found when thinking up the Global Weirding patch on a day that included a forecast of baseball-sized hail (which fortunately did not make an appearance) …

Wait, what? Weirding isn’t a word? Well fine, then show me weirding out …

Yeah, that fits. As suggested by Thomas Friedman …

the term global weirding makes more sense than global warming (although both are certainly true, with the warming causing the weirding).

So I found a stormy patch of cloth and stitched some imaginary hailstones …

then ironed out the erasable marks, because that’s what the cloth wanted that day.

Addenda:

Thursday was dark and gloomy, punctuated by rolling power outages and a steady freezing mist that encased everything in a sheath of ice.

It was all terribly beautiful. But water became an increasing concern, overshadowing the intermittent power supply. We were urged by our local officials to conserve water even as they warned us to keep faucets dripping to prevent our pipes from freezing.

We did our part: no showers and no laundry. Hedging our bets, we put a plug in the tub to conserve the water dripping from the tap. Then we waited.

Friday the sun came out. And even though the temperature remained below freezing, Texas sun can be a formidable force, even in February. The sky was its bluest blue and as the ice melted from each branch, the droplets of water caught the sun and glittered like fairy lights.

Electric power became a reliable utility once again. And if the cupboard was getting bare, there was a certain satisfaction that came with being able to let others get to the stores first. We could wait, so we did.

The biggest concern was our Austin daughter’s water situation. Broken water mains cut off all water to their neighborhood. But that’s a story for another patch.