… Mother Nature has finally stopped bawling her eyes out this week. The heavy rains that soaked New England the past few days have subsided, though the skies remained overcast for Friday's Patriots practice. Today's session was a shorts, shells, and helmets affair down on the Revolution field.

… If you believe that once is an accident, twice is a trend, and three is a problem, well, then, we have ourselves a problem with Sebastian Vollmer. For the third straight practice, he was the only Patriot missing from action. We now know that he's dealing with a back ailment, something that plagued him during his college career at Houston.

… All we were allowed to witness today was stretching. As soon as the team broke up into positional drills, the media was booted from the field. So, sorry, no interesting observations to share from the workout.

… Since the team plays on Monday night, they'll be practicing on Saturday and leaving via charter flight on Sunday afternoon.

… With Vollmer's health situation apparently not improving in time for Monday night, tackle Nate Solder was a popular interview subject today in the locker room, as you might imagine. Spoke to him and, for the first time, the new Gronk, Rob's older brother Dan Gronkowski. I'll post a full report later on patriots.com. I also tried to approach linebacker A.J. Edds with Patriots Today's Brian Lowe and a few other reporters, but he gave us a very brusque brush-off. Not a great first impression by Edds. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was just having a bad day. If he's lucky to be on the roster long enough, perhaps we'll give him a second chance.

UPDATE … 3:55 p.m.

No changes to the Friday injury report. Vollmer was still the only DNP, all 10 "limited" players remained as such, while Leigh Bodden and Julian Edelman took part fully with their hand injuries.