“Monster”. “Hurricane-like storm”. “Paralyzing blizzard”. “Dangerous, destructive”.

Wow! The folks at Accuweather sure know how to throw superlatives around when discussing the nor’easter forecast to roll up the Eastern seaboard late Thursday and pound the Northeast with heavy snow, rain, and wind this Friday. I mean, they’re talking about a cataclysmic event - you know, dogs and cats living together, that kind of thing.

Well, perhaps not, but who knows?

But as a weather buff there were few things I enjoyed more while living in Massachusetts than the anticipation of a big storm coming up the coast. First you’d hear rumors of it from a friend or a teaser on the local news, then you’d start checking out the weather every ten minutes on WBZ 1030 AM and stay up for the weather on the 11 PM news. Pretty soon, you’re planning and rearranging your schedule so as not to risk getting caught on Rte. 128 or stuck in traffic for hours, or without candles, bread, milk, and alcohol (not necessarily in that order!).

Here in the desert Southwest, the locals haven’t a clue as to what that feels like. Everything here is pretty damned predictable: you know by mid-May it will be blistering hot, so you get your A/C unit checked in April. You know by late November the nights will begin to cool, so you get your heating unit checked in October.

So easy, even a caveman could do it.

So, it’s kinda cool to think that the very same system that crossed Arizona yesterday to give us a few hours of soaking rain is the same system that’s now precipitating in Texas and will proceed eastward until it turns into a bomb off the East Coast and slams into my peeps all the way up in New England! Very cool.

Just so you know that even the biggest storms have to start somewhere, somehow, here’s the view from our northeast as the storm approached here in Gilbert. After a morning of soft rain, it got sunny for an hour, then turned quite dark as the main front came through. These clouds gave us a deluge for a good half hour, leaving in its wake a very chilly (at least for this time of year) afternoon and evening that dropped my pool temp, which had been making goo-goo eyes at 60 degrees, back down to a bracing 54.

They’ll be no swimming this weekend, Jackson, but it will still be a whole lot more benign than what the Northeast will get.

Cats and dogs living together, indeed.