Category Archives: Weather

Dirt + Water = Mud

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Garbage goes out on Sunday evening. Or to be exact, I take it out. Last night was cold but the suburban sky was clear, with about as many stars as you can see in a metro area of 9M people or so. At about 10 p.m., Orion lorded over the southwestern sky, ready to leave us for the warm months. Always good to see him, but also good to see him leaving.

Here on Earth — interesting that we call our home planet Dirt — not nearly enough people document Mud Season. It might not be worth a whole coffee table book, but maybe a chapter in Scenes From the Butt-End of Winter.

March10.14 240This is a recent view in Elk Grove Village, Ill., near the enclosure where the village — or maybe it’s the Cook County Forest Preserve District — keeps a small herd of elk. So in fact there’s an elk grove in Elk Grove. (Unlike, say, Country Club Hills, Ill., where there is no country club and are no hills.)

March10.14 241The elk were off in the distance and not worth photographing — the herd is barely visible in the above shot — so I concentrated on icy slush.

March Snows

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Snow, melt, snow — repeat. Bitter winter doesn’t quite want to give up, so the tug-of-war with spring is on. The dog’s enjoying the mud. The rest of us, not so much.

March snow isn’t that strange this far north. Here’s a picture I took on March 3, 2002, in Westmont, Ill. Lilly, 4, was making the most of the snow.

Lilly3.3.02That was a winter that didn’t want to give up, either. Even in May — when we were planning to go to Montreal — it was still uncomfortably cool most of the time, until just before we left. I have a feeling we’re going to get another one of those miserable springs again this year.

March Mounds

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Old Man Winter sees that our snow cover is melting, and mutters, “That’ll never do.” So we got a fresh coat overnight.

Recently I had an idea for a coffee table book, or maybe a coffee table anti-book. One featuring mounds of dirty snow. March10.14 237March10.14 244March10.14 238

Of course, these are just snapshots. A pro photographer and some good equipment could take some really arresting images of piles of suburban snow at the butt-end of winter.

Ice, Ice, Ice

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Here’s an arresting picture: a false-colored image the Great Lakes from space, taken on February 19 by a satellite called Aqua, which studies the Earth’s hydrosphere. Worth every bit of the tax money it took to put it into space, and then some.

The notes for the image say that “according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), ice cover on North America’s Great Lakes peaked at 88.42% on February 12-13 – a percentage not recorded since 1994. The ice extent has surpassed 80% just five times in four decades. The average maximum ice extent since 1973 is just over 50%.

“On the day this image was captured, according to NOAA GLERL, the ice concentration covering the great lakes were as follows: Superior, 91.76%; Michigan, 60.35%, Huron 94.63%, Erie, 92.79%, Ontario 20.78% and Lake Saint Claire, 98.78%, making for a total ice concentration of 80.29%.

“The extreme freezing of the lakes is an unusual sight for residents, and has brought tourists flocking to certain locations, such as the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, where Lake Superior’s thick ice has thousands trekking about 1 mile across the lake to visit spectacular frozen ice caves.”

I’d read elsewhere about the ice caves on Lake Superior. If driving up to northern Wisconsin weren’t such an ordeal in February, it’d be worth going that far to see.

The thought of something as mighty as Lake Superior freezing over boggles the mind. Even in warmer months, at 3 quadrillion gallons that lake is awe-inspiring.

March Enters Like a Dirty Snowball

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March arrived with more snow. Only three or four new inches, enough to whiten up the ugly grey mounts near the streets, but not enough to impede anyone’s forward motion. I thought about taking a picture from my back door, but what’s the point? It still looks exactly like this.

If it still looks like that around April 1, or especially May 1, we’d do well to worry that another Year Without a Summer is in the offing. But no really large volcanoes anywhere have blown recently, so it doesn’t seem likely.

Lilly got another one of these in the mail on Saturday.

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I don’t want to put them on my car bumper, so they go on the refrigerator.

The Horde

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Subzero again, at least overnight. Seems like the Polar Vortex is back. Which sounds like an enemy of Dick Tracy.

In case you ever wonder just who that’s been over the years, there’s this list. (What would we do without Wiki?) But I don’t plan to look at it very closely. Dick Tracy is something that could vanish in its entirety, and the world would be exactly the same without it.

Now this is an interesting story. Millions in buried treasure. How often does that happen? Just about never. Less likely than winning a multistate lottery.

But every now and then, there’s word of a horde of one kind or another. The psychology’s fascinating. Who buried a fortune in gold in cans on a stray piece of land in rural California and, more importantly, why didn’t they come back for them?

Recent Februaries

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Last winter we didn’t get much snow. But it finally did snow in February, in time for me to see downtown Chicago with patches of snow, such as on the fountain in the plaza in front of the Board of Trade Building.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABet it looks exactly like that now. Further along, I snapped a picture of “Flamingo,” a 50-ton steel work by Alexander Calder, which has been standing at Federal Plaza for about 40 years now.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATwo years ago in February, we had some particularly sticky snow one time.

Feb 27 2012 007But we were warm inside and able to enjoy warm food, such as octopus on rice.

Feb 27 2012 008I don’t know that Calder ever did a 50-ft. steel octopus-like form, but it would have been a cool sculpture.

Thursday Bagatelle

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I drove through thick fog early this evening. Remarkably, the fog disappeared in about 10 minutes as I was driving along – blown away by the strong winds entering the Chicago area that are still gusting outside, and which are supposed to last into tomorrow.

While writing about small-nation participants in the Olympics last week, my thoughts naturally turned to Sealand. (Whose wouldn’t?) Besides no status as an actual country, Sealand has no Olympic committee, either. But it’s always entertaining to read about the place.

The founder of Sealand died only in 2012, which I hadn’t heard. I also didn’t realize that Sealandic coins have been minted, but here they are. Somewhere out in the wide world, there’s a numismatist whose specialty is micronations. There has to be.

I watched the first part of the first episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon today – watched it the modern way, on demand, not when it was first broadcast. It’s been a good many years since I watched much of The Tonight Show. Briefly, just before Lilly was born, we’d watch Jay Leno, but I never took to him. In the mid-70s, I watched Johnny Carson regularly for a few years, which might have been unusual for someone in his early teens, but lost interest later.

I hadn’t seen much of Fallon before. Seems like an amiable fellow, and talented enough for the job. Still, I have the ridiculous feeling that the host of The Tonight Show ought to be older than me. Just to look at him, Fallon reminds me of a young assistant high school principal or a young insurance agent.

At a post office the other day – they say the USPS is losing money, but there’s always a line at my closest one – I saw an ad for replica Inverted Jenny stamps. Turns out they’ve been for sale for some months, with a $2 denomination. If they’d asked me, I would have suggested they be a postcard denomination (lately 34 cents). Sticking even a replica Inverted Jenny on a casual postcard would be fun.

Hadn’t thought about those stamps in a long time. Philately wasn’t ever as interesting for me as numismatics, but everyone ought to know about the Inverted Jenny. I made sure to tell Lilly about it. “That much for a stamp?” she said when I told her they sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the bizarre world of collectibles for you.

Anna Maria Alberghetti in a Wintry Mix, Honey

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Another day above freezing. That’s a good thing, except for the current forecast. The following is direct from the National Weather Service, which is worthy of respect for its accuracy, but also the fact that it doesn’t fix cute names to winter storms. The NWS put out this “Special Statement” for my part of the country early this evening.

RAIN AND EVEN SOME THUNDERSTORMS WILL DEVELOP ACROSS NORTHERN ILLINOIS LATER TONIGHT. HOWEVER… TEMPERATURES ACROSS FAR NORTHERN ILLINOIS… MAINLY ALONG AND NORTH OF INTERSTATE 88… [we’re north of I-88 by a few miles] MAY REMAIN COLD ENOUGH TONIGHT FOR THIS PRECIPITATION TO BEGIN AS A WINTRY MIX OF SNOW… SLEET OR FREEZING RAIN BEFORE MUCH WARMER TEMPERATURES ARRIVE THURSDAY MORNING.

DUE TO THE FACT THAT THE PRECIPITATION COULD FALL AT A HEAVY RATE LATE TONIGHT…THIS COULD RESULT IN SOME SNOW OR ICE ACCUMULATIONS ACROSS PORTIONS OF THE AREA BY DAYBREAK THURSDAY… POSSIBLY IMPACTING THE MORNING COMMUTE.

CURRENTLY IT APPEARS THAT A COUPLE INCHES INCHES OF SNOW MAY ACCUMULATE BEFORE THE WINTRY MIX CHANGES TO ALL RAIN EARLY THURSDAY MORNING.

Odd forecast. Deuced odd, it is.

Speaking of odd, it took me nearly 40 years to get the following knock-knock joke, as told by Ted Baxter during the Sept. 13, 1975, episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Edie Gets Married.”

Not that I’ve been puzzling over it for 40 years. I’d forgotten all about it until today, walking around in the fairly pleasant afternoon air, when I thought, What did that joke about Anna Maria Alberghetti mean? Memory works in mysterious ways.

Just as unlikely, I remembered to look it up when I got home, connecting the joke to “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” which I’d heard before – but (much) more recently than 1975. It was clearly a joke for grownups back then, back when sitcom writers actually wrote jokes for grownups.

A lot of singers have done the song. Fats Domino’s version is here.

Late Winter Dog Holes

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More new snow out there, some four or five inches. Just waiting to be re-arranged slightly by me so that our auto-mobiles can made forward progress away from the garage. Or rather, backward motion out of our driveway.

But at least the snow didn’t come as part of a crippling blizzard. Even better, it’s supposed to be above freezing for part of the rest of the week. Slowly the Northern Hemisphere angles toward the Sun. Spring is nigh, and we can look forward to thunderstorms, mud, flood warnings, and the specter of tornadoes.

Meantime, the dog entertains herself by digging holes in the snow.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAGo figure. Looking forward to digging in the mud, probably.