The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for Sullivan County, along with much of Pennsylvania, for Friday afternoon and evening. (Update, 9:30pm: The area is no longer under tornado watch.)

Sullivan County, along with the rest of the Catskills region, can expect thunderstorms, heavy rain, and gusting winds of up to 40 or 50 miles per hour as a cold front moves through the area from west to east. 

As of around 4pm, Hudson Valley Weather reported, the line of storms was moving through Western Pennsylvania. 

Update, 8:30pm: Delaware and Sullivan Counties are both under severe thunderstorm warnings until 9pm:

Photo by Flickr user Chris Costes; published under Creative Commons license.

Sharpen your No. 2 pencils, kids. This week, public-school students in third through eighth grade across New York State buckled down at their desks for the first round of tough new standardized tests in English Language Arts. Next week, students face another round of testing in math. The new tests are designed for the Common Core curriculum, a new educational initiative that has been adopted by 45 states so far.

Eighteen runners from the Catskills region -- Delaware, Greene, Schoharie, Sullivan and Ulster Counties -- were among those registered for the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15, where explosions killed at least three people and injured over 140.

The Watershed Post obtained the names of the local runners with a zipcode-based search of the Boston Marathon organizers' runner database. Among them were two runners from Delaware County, two from Schoharie County, one from Sullivan County and thirteen from Ulster County. No runners from Greene County were found in the database.

Embedded below is a spreadsheet of the runners, with their home towns. We have cross-referenced their names with Google's Boston Marathon Person Finder to find out if local runners have been reported as safe. The links in the "Link" column lead to more information about specific runners.

Catskill: Not a bunch of mountains in upstate New York. Photo by Flickr user Doug Kerr; published under Creative Commons license.

You've got to feel for the village of Catskill. It's forever getting confused with the Catskills -- a region that the little waterfront village of Catskill, perched on the west bank of the Hudson River at the feet of the mountains, isn't quite part of.

To make things even more confusing, it's one of those upstate New York villages that shares a name with the much larger town that surrounds it. (The region is full of them: Coxsackie, New Paltz, Cobleskill, Schoharie, Middleburgh.)