The weather wasn’t nearly as wild as it could have been. The National Weather Service had warned that Hurricane Noel could bring winds gusting up to 70 miles per hour, but here in New Bedford the wind gusts never got above 39 miles per hour — enough to bring down small branches and tear some flags to shreds, but really not all that bad. And the National Weather Service had warned of the possibility of thunderstorms with heavy rains and a total accumulation of two to four inches, but so far we haven’t even gotten an inch of rain since yesterday.

I stayed in most of the day because of the severe weather warnings. I didn’t take my usual hour-long walk. The barometer kept dropping, down to 992 millibars, and my bones ached. By the end of the day I was feeling so cranky and antsy that this evening I actually lifted weights. I hate lifting weights, but after I was done I felt much better. But oh, how I wished I had taken a walk this afternoon, instead of believing the weather forecasters and their dire predictions.

I was still cursing myself for being stupid enough to listen to the weather forecasts when I checked the weather observations for Nantucket, just fifty miles east of here. The weather station on Nantucket recorded wind gusts of over 70 miles per hour (that’s hurricane force) with steady winds above 50 miles per hour, and they’ve had over three inches of rain so far. It wouldn’t have taken much — just a little twitch in the hurricane’s track — for that wind and rain to have hit here.