Bad customer service at Target. (I walked down to the aisle in time to catch the stock boy take the sale sign down. He told me he took it down. Not shopping there anymore.

What’s up with the Haiti seeds in Farmville?

You’ll have a long walk if you go to the Penn State game.

A worthwhile experiment – if you can remember to do it for a full month.

Pennsylvania’s new budget cuts funds for environmental projects.

The only dry part of the Memorial Weekend cook-out was the grill lighting.

This summer has been particularly moist. It’s been cloudy and wet – half the days in July had rain. But my wife and I have done a good job sneaking in meals at the grill. It’s been a few more lunches than expected (and even breakfast one time). Our big Memorial Day bash was drenched – the out-of-town guests still said they had fun. We’ve dodged rain drops to grill and to pick and choose the days and meals we cook outside.

Earlier today, we grilled out for the 60th time this year. We’ve done the classics – burgers and hot dogs, steak, and chicken. We’ve grilled brats, salmon, tilapia, and pork chops. We’ve even grilled bacon and sausage (but not the famous explosion). And we’ve grilled countless vegetables as sides to almost all of these meals.

Summer is winding down. Fall weather is great – but it isn’t always the best for grilling. Grad classes start a little more than a week from now. That will bring shifts in our work and responsibilities. My wife and I have a busy few months planned – organizing and combining books and movies, scanning photographs, wrestling with boxes of files from one of the community groups I’m involved with. There’s also a handful of weekend trips – weddings and orchard visits among them – scheduled.

Here’s looking forward to at least a dozen more times over the grill.

But global warming is how everyone thinks of climate change so Friedman writes about a series of interviews where his subjects talk about noticing warmer weather. Western ranchers talk about less snow remaining on mountain tops. Another person speaks about the number of record highs and lows set across the country each week. That left me wondering whether I could find any change in weather in my area simply by looking at record highs and lows and when they were set.

I checked the National Weather Service’s repository of record highs and lows for the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area – my current home. I used the tables from 1955 to present because they’re pulled from a consistent place (the airport) rather than the general area. I typed the date, record high (“maximum high”) and corresponding year, and record low (“minimum low”) and corresponding year into an Excel spreadsheet. It’s unfortunate that the records only cover 54 years, but they’re taken from a consistent area, which was more important to me than whether they covered 100 years worth of temperatures.

Because I wasn’t counting leap day, I had 365 days. The time period covered 54 years. Simple math says that if there are 365 record highs and 365 record lows, I should be able to expect about 7 record highs and 7 record lows each year.

If this covered two years – 1955 and 1956 – I’d expect half of the highs to be from 1955 and the other half to be from 1956. If it covered five years – 1955 to 1959, I’d expect 20 percent of the highs (73) to come from each year. Because I have 54 years, I expected 1.85 percent of the highs to have occurred in any one year. In a 365-day year, that’s 6.75 days. There were 365 lows as well – one for each day of the year. Odds say that another 6.75 lows – rounded to 7 – would set records each year.

I realize that some years just happen to be warmer or cooler than others, and so I wanted a way to lump years together. I decided to do it by decade. There were five years in the 1950s, nine years in the 2000s (the chart doesn’t cover 2009 temperatures), and 10 years for the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. So odds say that I should have 33 or 34 records from the 1950s, 60 or 61 records from the 200s and 67 or 68 records for the other decades. If my numbers were around there, we’d be setting roughly equal numbers of record highs and record lows each year – and you wouldn’t be able to track the weather getting warmer or colder.

I didn’t get those results.

As you can see, there were a lot more record high temperatures set more recently than record lows. In the 1990s and the 2000s, there were 77.8 percent more record highs set than record lows set. We were still setting record low temperatures, but we were setting new high temperatures much more often. While the 1990s represented 18.5 percent of the years in the study, 26 percent of the high temperatures occurred in that decade. The 2000s represented 16.7 percent of the years, and 21.9 percent of the high temperatures. The 1950s are 9.3 percent of the years in the study, and 5.5 percent of the high temperatures. That same decade has 15.3 percent of the record lows for the period.

We’re setting both new highs and new lows in each decade. But there highs are coming more frequently most recently. But how drastic is the change? It’s difficult to see because the 1950s and 2000s don’t have the same number of years included as the other decades. To have a better view of the trend, I divided the 54 years into nine groups of six years each: 1955-1960, 1961-1966, 1967-1972, 1973-1978, 1979-1984, 1985-1990, 1991-1996, 1997-2002, 2003-2008.

Odds should say that you should have roughly equal number of record highs and record lows set in each time period – just more than 40.5 each. (1.85 percent of the highs in each of the six years is 11.1 percent of the records, and 11.1 percent of the 365 days in a year is 40.5.) The final numbers didn’t match the odds. Remember, the number of records for both highs and lows should be right around 40.

I’ve been really surprised to see this result. I’ll take some time to look into individual months to see if any part of the year is more affected than another. But it turns out to have been pretty easy to chart the fact that’s it’s getting warmer in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We’re setting many more record highs than record lows.

Sometimes there are blue skies in Seattle.

Standing outside the terminal of Seattle-Tacoma Airport, I could feel the cool, moist air on my skin. I was waiting for my ride to take me to my hotel in downtown Seattle, and without seeing anything of the area, I could tell the land was defined by the surrounding water. A big sound, lakes, a mixture of rivers, streams, and canals. I wouldn’t get to explore these waterways – nor would I get to see as much of the Pacific Northwest as I had hoped – but I had a pleasant introduction that’s bound to take me back.

I had the chance to travel to Seattle for a conference at the end of October. The Pacific Northwest has long had a hold of my interest for whatever reason, but I had never visited before. I knew some of the basics – rain, coffee, Space Needle – but didn’t know the history or tourist highlights. I had about two weeks notice so I scanned the guidebooks at the local Borders and settled on the 4th Edition of Fodor’s Seattle guide, which I figured would be thoroughly thumbed through on the six hour flight from Philadelphia. I took the book home, cracked it open, circled my hotel (Grand Hyatt – conferences mean a big upgrade on the accommodations) on a map, and stuck a paperclip as a marker at the top of the page.

The flight from Scranton was late, and I missed my Philadelphia connection. I started a few projects on my laptop and napped on the evening flight. The guidebook was not dog-eared – merely occasionally consulted – each night from my room with the giant neon sign for The Roosevelt Hotel blocking Puget Sound. That’s how deeply I got into the guidebook, and – with this being a business trip – how deeply I got into the city. Since returning, however, I’ve opened up the guidebook to learn more about the city, and I’m sure I’ll return to the city in the same way.

The Native American presence is noticeable in the Pacific Northwest.

My cousin and her two daughters came into the city after the first day of the conference. We drove to Pike Place Market – a Farmers Market open early every morning and closing at 6 p.m. each night as we found. We had about an hour to wander through the stalls, examining fresh fish, fresh flowers, and fresh coffee. This trip was only going to capture basic Seattle tourism so I got a few standard shots. That’s when my cousin’s daughter spotted the totem poles at the edge of the market. We got a 20-minute second grade lesson on the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest before leaving for dinner.

Later that night I left the hotel and crossed the street to Von’s. Some of my friends have dreamed of this bar without ever setting foot in the Pacific time zone. I tried to count the number of bottles lined up behind the bar. I skimmed through old clippings and signs hung on the walls. It isn’t a dive, but an interesting slice of downtown city life.

No, I didn't pack any to take home

The next day, we swung by the Space Needle and Lake Washington on the way to my cousin’s house. I went trick-or-treating with their family (yeah, dated post, huh?) for the first time in years and spent the night swapping family stories. My flight was scheduled for early the next morning.

The conference never let me get out to see the city. I ended up parked in the hotel for nearly the entire trip. But the visit was just enough to whet my appetite. (And avoid getting wet – just sprinkles one afternoon. The rain, for that week at least, was overhyped.) I’m checking flight costs to the Northwest again – this time for personal and not professional exploration.

On Thursday morning, they updated the forecast. This would be a decent storm. We’d be driving straight through the storm to get home on Friday night. Or we’d be driving across roads with as much as a foot of ice and snow that may or may not be plowed. I spent my lunch hour looking at weather projections and maps. We talked at 3:30 that afternoon – we’d leave town that night (pack quickly…) and drive south where the weather should be limited to rain.

I’d never had much success trying to outflank a weather pattern before. I’ve failed to outrun snow storms in the past. I’ve driven along the Texas countryside trying to get to a cross road and out of a tornado’s path. Last year, we were forced to land in Toledo and stuck overnight in Detroit while trying to get home after Christmas. But we pack and leave by 7 p.m.

We were most of the way to Harrisburg when we called Roger to ask about the forecast for Pittsburgh. Either we’d turn west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike or stay south and head for Hagerstown, Maryland depending on whether Pittsburgh would have freezing rain that night. The weather looked clear until 1 a.m. and would be just rain by 10 a.m. – easy set-up for crashing in a hotel room. We turned west on I-76 and set our sights on New Stanton – a place Franchise selected.

The road was pretty clear, the weather held, although I was tired and we pulled off one exit early – about 20 miles shy of our intended destination. I noticed the name of the county on the way in. A long time ago, a branch of my mom’s family lived in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Most of the family moved out after about 20 years. Only a few brothers stayed behind. I didn’t have any graves to search for and doubted there would be much paper record because the family left about 200 years ago.

We found the hotel and crashed for the night. Neither of us had heard of our jobs being closed the next day so we’d have to wake early to learn about the cancellations through text message or call off for the day. Franchise’s phone alarm sounded at 6:15 a.m. Within a few minutes, she received her cancellation text and rolled back over. I wasn’t cancelled so I spent a few minutes surfing the web on my Blackberry – learning a bit about the county’s history. That’s when I heard the buzzing – a quiet alarm sounding from the hallway. I rolled over to look at the alarm clock – dark. I flipped the bed lamp switch – nothing.Franchise slept blissfully in the bed – completely unaware. But I sat there thinking about my situation.I had never expected to find myself in Westmoreland County with no powern while rain poured outside while I tried to outsmart the seasonal weather.

Power was still out when Franchise woke so we considered our options. Donuts in the lobby and a dark bathroom. I grabbed my phone and Franchise’s GPS to Google and map the county historical society. Then I proposed an option to Franchise. We drive 20 miles to the historical society. Enjoy light, power, running water. I’d search their records for 30 minutes to see if they have anything pertaining to my family – anything that might encourage or dissuade me from visiting again. Then we’d get back on the road. Sometimes, when an opportunity is presented, you can’t let it go – particularly if it’s something you really enjoy doing.

Franchise didn’t sign up to leave Thursday night. She didn’t want to scamper out of Scranton wondering whether she would need to call in a sub for the next day. She didn’t want to be in a powerless hotel in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And she certainly didn’t want to spend the day in the archives somewhere while I did research. I could see the thoughts form in her head: Can’t he go anywhere without having to do genealogy research? She was gracious though. If there’s power, OK, she said. We checked the front desk. The hotel expected to be without power for the next 20 hours. The county seat had power. We packed the car and left.

Sure, I remembered the family name that resided in the area for 20-25 years. Bennetts. William, the patriarch, fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill and Yorktown. Isaac, his youngest son, is my direct ancestor. No clue on the dates or years they lived there or who was born, died, and married where. Totally unprepared and not expecting to parachute in to do anything with this family – particularly in a county where they resided for only a portion of their movement through the fledgling United States.

I walked into the Westmoreland County Historical Society with my laptop – full of all the family history scans I’ve collected – my brains for the day because I haven’t looked at this family in at least a year. The staff was nice – really helpful in digging up books and talking about the history of the area. I found a copy of a land deed from April 6, 1795 and a couple of mentions of the families that remained behind. Franchise read To Kill a Mockingbird. We stuck around about 90 minutes before hitting up the hotdog eatery on the corner and heading to Ohio.

The trip’s started with a lot of potential for a great story. Franchise and I have already decided that the Christmases since the wedding have been particularly adventuresome. We’re not done yet, but we made the best of a surprise situation.

The channel almost immediately went live to its reporter covering Hurricane Dean hitting Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Jim Cantore, the meteorologist whose appearance signals a hurricane as surely as 20-foot waves and 150-mile-per-hour winds, was broadcasting from Puerto Aventura. Interesting, I thought, that’s where I was one month ago today.

I told my wife to turn on her television. The more we watched, the more it looked as though The Weather Channel was broadcasting from the exact resort we stayed at during our honeymoon. The cameraman eventually pulled back and began to pan over the resort. We recognized it immediately. The Aventura Spa Palace was getting hammered by Hurricane Dean.

One month ago was the day we returned from our honeymoon. On the way to the airport, I asked our driver what happens when a storm hits the tourism-driven Riviera Maya. “If you have a cement house, you stay in your house,” he said. “If you do not have a cement house, you leave your home and look for a friend with a cement house.” People head inland, our driver said. The area averages a hurricane about every 5 years. The last time they were hit badly, he said, was four years ago. “The economy was very bad for six months then,” the driver said. “Nobody had jobs because nobody visited.”

I hope they finish the repairs quickly.