Not the planet, the stuff in the thermometer. When I went to breakfast this morning, it was a balmy and muggy 73°. Same when I left the bagel shop and started driving to work, though there was an ominous black cloud looming over the trees to the north. I clicked on the digital readout on my dashboard and watched the numbers tick downward. By the time I got to the office (less than 2 miles), the readout said 64°. Within the hour, the temperature had reached 45° and the overnight low is around the freezing mark. A change of over forty degrees in one day.
Ahead of the cold front, it’s still 85° down in Brownsville.
The last time I witnessed something like this, my wife and I were sitting in an IHOP near the freeway, watching the digital thermometer on a nearby bank, laughing at how the thing must be malfunctioning because there’s no way the temperature could change that much in so short a time. How wrong we were. Freeze warnings for tonight, so I guess winter is here. For now, at least.
Today is the last day of November, thus the last day of NaNoWriMo. I uploaded my validation text yesterday to beat the rush on their server and was officially declared a winner. I’m at 75,000 words on the novel, 53,000 of which were written in the last four weeks. The separate plot threads are starting to move toward their individual crises and hopefully the whole thing will dovetail together in the next 15-20,000 words. I know the book is “fat” with extraneous material, but that’s what editing was for. Anything that occurred to me—especially during the past month—I wrote down.
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