Category Archives: Weather

Taraxacum on the Lawn

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Back to posting on Tuesday, in honor of Memorial Day, Observed, dead ahead. It’s a little early this year, owing to the shifting of the calendar. The closer to May 30, the better, but not this year.

An oxymoron for the day: temporary resilience. That’s what dandelions have in May. I mowed a lot of dandelions down on Tuesday afternoon, in both back and front yards, ahead of the wave of thunderstorms that blew through Tuesday evening and late into the night. I don’t have anything against dandelions, since they’re part of the biodiversity of the suburbs. They just happened to be in the way.

By Wednesday about noon, under warm sunny skies, some of the dandelion stalks were back. So they’ve got resilience. But the stalks won’t last through the summer, whether I mow or not. So they’re also temporary.

My daughters don’t stoop over to pick them any more, just as they don’t ask for toys any more, but the other day — when the dandelions were at their fullest — I noticed a couple of little neighborhood kids raiding our front yard for dandelion blooms.

That Cold Blood Moon

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It was too cold this morning to drag myself outside and document the snow clinging to the April grass and trees. Why bother anyway? It looked more-or-less like this.

Actually a little less snow coated the ground this time than seven years ago, at least as recorded by my pictures. There wasn’t quite as much sticking to the branches, and none on the street. In any case, except for shadowy spots, all the snow vanished in the afternoon sun, pale and weak as it was.

Missed the early morning Blood Moon, as some headline writers seem to be calling the latest lunar eclipse. They’re nice to see, but not worth getting up at 3 in the morning, especially when it was snowing when you went to bed a few hours earlier. It’s a hard enough sell when it’s merely cold outside, as it also was this morning.

I didn’t miss the season opener of Mad Men, which apparently got low ratings. As a casual viewer of TV, the last thing I care about is ratings, especially for a show that’s going to end on a schedule anyway. It was a decent episode, neither the best nor the worst of the series, and as usual seemed to inspire a lot of commentary, so I won’t really add to that total, even in my small way.

Writing about television in general seems to inspire a body of ridiculous, or at least pointless, writing. Not long ago I saw a headline something like this: “Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead Occupy the Same Universe.” The only reasonable reaction to that is, who cares?

A Post-Winter, Pre-Spring Stroll

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No early greening this year, that’s for sure, though very small buds can be seen if you look closely. Still, Saturday was a fine day for a walk at Meacham Grove Forest Preserve.

April5.14 008It’s been a while since we were there. Despite the warmish temps, not many people were around. That could be because the only entrance to the preserve’s parking lot is off a side street that’s some distance from Lake St., the nearest large road. The forest is highly visible from another large road – Bloomingdale Rd. – but it’s just another roadside feature most of the time. It takes a little effort to figure out where to put your car so that you can walk. An oddly North American situation.

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.