Nothing but blue skies is all I see

After the wild weather of the last couple of days, a calm dome of cold air has settled atop of us. The contrails are like dusty chalk lines against the deep blue sky. When the upper air is calm, contrails can last for hours. If the jet stream is chugging along normally, the markings of the jets' passage are gone in minutes or even seconds.

The National Weather Service forecast says that we can expect more heavy rain tomorrow night into Saturday. The meteorologist calls the storm "an inside runner," meaning that it will go up the eastern seaboard, but the center of the low will stay over land, perhaps as far inland as the Appalachian chain. An inside runner brings us rain, while the far north and west gets ice or snow. Yesterday's storm cleared away snow from half of our back yard, but the ground is still hard frozen.

As I've mentioned before, I use some of the automated search tools in Google to keep track of news on various topics. The searches that I have set up for depression, as you might expect, pick up info about the mental illness, but also about troubled economic times. It turns out that economic advisers to the president have maintained a Misery Index since the 1960s. The index is simply the unemployment rate added to the inflation rate. The worst rating was in the latter party of the Carter administrator, while Ike scored the best. The current administration is in the middle of the pack, better than his father's, but worse than Bill Clinton's.

So, what can we expect from the future?