A winter storm is closing in on Howdygram headquarters.

In this post: Too much weather, plenty of “Columbo.”

Hello, people. It’s 9:30 Thursday night and I spent most of the day involved in a variety of routine activities. For instance, I: 1) made homemade Hanukkah and Thanksgiving cards for young relatives and old friends; 2) ordered a lot of Vitamin D capsules for Sam from Costco.com; 3) slept through Goodbye, My Fancy (1951) starring Joan Crawford and Robert Young; 4) kept an eye out for UPS because shitty weather is moving in and I don’t want today’s deliveries to get pummeled with hailstones; and 5) I can’t think of anything else. An explanation for #4 follows for your possible interest.

SHITTY WEATHER, EXPLAINED. It’s 76° outside as I write this post, but badass thunderstorms with heavy rain are closing in on the Dallas area right now (see the weather map below). They’re ushering in a cold front that will drop temperatures into the low 30s and deliver sleet all day Saturday and a SUBSTANTIAL ICE STORM on Sunday. The red star denotes Howdygram headquarters in Mesquite. If you zoom in, I’m the angry senior citizen in a gray robe who hates ice.

UPS just dropped off my deliveries: wintergreen Tic Tacs, a big bottle of McCormick’s instant poultry gravy and a gallon can of freeze dried ground beef. In my view, these are the top three key ingredients of any great meal ... and now that everything’s here I can finally make dinner and watch tonight episode of “Project Runway All-Stars.” For the record, these yahoos are not “all-stars” by any stretch of the imagination. They’re mostly losers from previous seasons who came back to try again, and they’re not any better the second time around. My two least-favorites this season are Elena and Jeffrey. Elena cries in every episode, has no confidence in herself and gets everybody involved in way too much hysteria and drama. Jeffrey is just an arrogant ass with tattoos all over his his neck.

It’s thundering and Sam just got home from work, so this might be a fine time for a nice hot shower, insulin, dinner, a bunch of low-carb chocolate and another episode of “Columbo” from the new DVD collection we got a couple of weeks ago from Amazon. We’re still working our way through the first season (1971).

Incidentally, Amazon just raised the price by $28. We paid $52 for the complete collection; it’s listed now for $79.99. You’d better hurry before nobody can afford it. The boxed set includes the two original pilots, 69 episodes from nine seasons plus 24 “Columbo” made-for-TV movies from the 1990s.

Life is good. Eat more gefilte fish.