On Sunday at 4:26 p.m., I caught an glimpse of the sullen sky through the kitchen window. Quickly I reached for my handy-dandy Palm TX to get an updated forecast. That's when I saw the oddest weather page I think I have ever seen. The weather wasn't "cloudy" or even "light rain" as it had been around noon. No, it was something that I had never seen before.

"Thunder in the vicinity."

Considering where I live in Arizona, that goes beyond uninformative to evasive. After all, I can drive twenty minutes and have a 180˚ view that stretches sixty to seventy miles in the daylight. A few years back when the wildfires in Arizona were so bad, at night I could see the glow to the south, and that was a couple of hundred miles away. My "backyard" is at least anything that is within a half-day's travel.

Direction wise, that's next to useless. I know that if I go north, I'll eventually hit Canada. If I go west, I'll eventually hit the Pacific. But if I want to hit a specific place between those two extremes, say, the Greens Restaurant, I need better directions.

I had never seen a weather reading like that, it sounds impressive but is amazingly uninformative.

I have to wonder how many settle for "in the vicinity," especially with spellcraft. We wouldn't expect a chicken to roast itself if we stuck it on the counter across from the oven. We wouldn't expect to clean ourselves by standing outside the bathtub. Fertilizer doesn't do any good if it stays in the bag on the patio.

Beware of “in the vicinity.”