8 days
Whew it’s been a weather here. A week ago today, early in the morning, it started snowing as if being blasted from a fire hose, and the temperatures went down way below freezing and stayed there until today.
So now there is slush everywhere, but even so walking is easier than it’s been for a week, and tomorrow it will be more so. I just walked up and down the block 8 times because the sidewalk is naked from one end to the other and that’s still a rarity. Before that I walked to the library – it had been closed for the whole week.
Your Chicago and Minneapolis don’t close down when it snows but then it snows a lot more there, and also Seattle is all hills.
It was 108 Fahrenheit here during the heat dome, and 17 F during the snow week. I think that’s a record temperature spread for one year.
Yep, the weather sucks, and by that I mean the the weather here in the Deep South has been beautiful. While it’s nice to take long walks in shirt sleeves, it’s a little unnerving when you aren’t swearing a little about the cold in late December/early January. My daffodils are already pushing through about an inch, and last year that wasn’t happening until late February. But as sure as washing my car guarantees a rain storm, my mentioning how nice it is will probably bring down a horrific ice storm or some such. If you believe in that sort of thing. :P
The beautiful Scots word for that sort of snow is ‘yowdendrift’. There’s a wonderful poem by Hugh MacDiarmid in which the word is used: ‘The Eemis Stane’.
And not just all hills, but hills with crazy tiny narrow streets paved with bricks. It’s nuts. No wonder the entire place shuts down when snow like this hits.
We’ve had crazy weather here, too, breaking temperature records for highs. This weekend, we got snow, about 2 inches, so for the moment it’s seasonal but it’s supposed to be above freezing all next week. I’m used to the snow here sticking around for a few days, but it seems unlikely.
There are some horribly narrow streets around here, that’s true. And they’re on steep hills. Triple the fun when there’s an Amazon van parked next to a parked car with its flashers on. It’s a good thing I have to drive only when I’m on Cooper duty (and not even then when the streets are solid ice).
Yeah, one of the joys of living in Chicago is that back in the 1970s, a mayoral election was decided largely by virtue of a blizzard. Every municipality in the region has never, ever forgotten that lesson. They start buying road salt in March, and make sure the plows are all working come October 1st.
I do like the look of snow but it does make walking difficult. Worse, of course, are the icy pavements. The Council is not that bad at gritting and salting, but I don’t trust them.
Here in Scotland we have had the mildest New Year on record and like twiliter, my bulbs (irises) are pushing through too early. It’s been around 14C. The local rag keeps predicting a deep freeze, heavy snow etc but local, and national, rags love to predict this, for the drama. Of course the UK is notoriously bad at coping with snow, since it is so unpredictable here.
I went for a walk yesterday with my jacket open. The temperature feels like early October, but the light is wrong and the trees are bare.
Having never seen snow, and with the Australian summer swelling, I am interested in snow. Send some my way to quench the next heat wave, please.
Meanwhile I went on a New Year’s walk in a sleeveless top, light raincoat and fleece trousers and was way overdressed–I’m literally planning to go back to my summer wardrobe. In January.
Here in Minneapolis/St. Paul. we’ve had a relatively mild winter with not much snow, but we’re in the cold months now. Temps below 0deg F are interspersed with warm spells barely above freezing. It’s not bad except that ice tends to form hidden under snow.
The roads are salted here to help prevent icing over as much as possible, but now environmental scientists are discovering the extent to which the freshwaters that flow through here are getting salty. It’s a conundrum that can only be solved by flying cars.
In Alabama, part of the state was under a snow advisory, and part under a tornado watch yesterday. We were fortunately in the part that had neither. Two or more inches of snow fell in parts of the state that had 80 degree weather just a few days ago. It’s nuts. I’m glad not to have to deal with plowing a driveway, or almost never with driving on snowy roads, but it does get cold sometimes.
This is normally a time of year when I enjoy the warm weather here and love comparing it to the narrowed roads and deep snow banks where I used to live in Massachusetts, but sometimes it is cold here or warm there and the comparison isn’t stark enough to be fun.
It doesn’t often snow in Marseilles, or even on the neighbouring hills, but when it does, to the extent of 1cm or so of settled snow the whole city grinds to a halt.
Speaking of towns that aren’t that good with snow, I remember the first time I was driving west on highway 26 out of Portland (having grown up around a lot of snow) and seeing dozens and dozens of cars just abandoned in all three traffic lanes after a light dusting. It was eerie. I asked my partner in crime if we had once again missed the rapture, but she reminded me that Godless Portland was unlikely to be a major source of the 144k, so we settled on it being like an old sci-fi movie where everyone just disappears after a comet flyby or some shit. I half expected Charlton Heston to show up hamming something about, “Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
Here in the DC area it was close to 70 over the weekend, and humid. Now it’s been snowing all day. Roads are in pretty bad shape (seems like the area is annually taken by surprise when it snows), but fortunately no one in our household has any reason to be out driving.
Here in Calgary we just had 2 days of mild weather, ie: almost up to 0 C, between periods of temperatures below -20 C. I think tomorrow I will put on *lots* of layers & ski on the golf course at -25.
It’s all what you are accustomed to.
I’ve been wearing SO many layers – sweater on top of sweater on top of sweater on top of sweater on top of sweater, plus huge fleecy jacket. Sweaters are my friends.