Category Archives: Weather

Gray December

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Today was intensely gray. One of the more overcast days we’ve had in a while, with cold drizzle most of the time. Various sources said that snow was on the way—something that hasn’t stuck to the ground since late February. As of about 10 pm, we’d gotten only a little snow, though some places not so far away reportedly have much more. Here, I can still see the grass poking through.

In fact, puddles of water are still visible on the driveway, lit up by the streetlight. That can only mean one thing tomorrow: sidewalk ice. Lilly might have to brave it walking to the corner to catch the bus, and Ann might have to deal with it on her walk to school, unless it gets called off. But that doesn’t look likely, considering the piddling amount of snow.

Lilly got around to having a birthday event earlier this month, a couple of weeks after her birthday according to the calendar. “Event” because I can’t call it a party. She doesn’t call it that any more. Just a gathering of friends who spent the evening with her, ate some food, watched a movie, and all slept on the living room floor overnight.

But we did have a cake, and she got some presents, mostly gift cards to shops best known to her and her friends.

He Gave Up the Corncob Pipe Years Ago

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You never know what will turn up aggregated by Google News these days.

Washington, DC—Frosty the Snowman testified by video link today before a Senate subcommittee on the effects of climate change on Snow People. Speaking from his winter residence in Frostbite Falls, Minn., a sometimes visibly agitated Frosty recalled how his community has lost members due to unexpectedly warm spells in the continental United States that have been occurring more frequently in recent years.

The usually happy, jolly soul also complained of the hardships involved in summering much further north than in previous decades. In recent years, Frosty and his wife Crystal have established camp on the remote Ellesmere Is. in the Canadian Arctic during summer in the Northern Hemisphere, a place “even we consider a barren wasteland,” Frosty said…

And so on. Maybe it made it to Drudge, too, under the screaming head: FROSTY BITES CONGRESS!

April in December

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A weather report told me it reached 70 degrees F outside today – only the third time that’s happened on a December 3 since whenever in the 19th century regular temperature records started being kept in Chicago. (Imagine the report for October 8, 1871: just over 451 F, with strong winds.)

Not that I went out to walk around much. Had much tapping work to do at my various keyboards, which is inside work. But I did go out to collect the empty trash cans in the mid-afternoon. It was like April. A good day in April, not one of those miserable winter leftover days. Go figure.

We’re sure to be slapped around by a blizzard soon. That’s what I thought last year, and I was wrong.

Winter Begins With No Bang

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Been rugging up for winter lately: heater cleaned and inspected, gutters cleared of leaf debris to prevent ice dams, some tube sand and a snow shovel put in position outside the back door, heavy coats rotated back into easily accessed locations—and what did we get on the first day of meteorological winter, December 1, 2012? Overcast skies in the afternoon, temps in the 50s, and rain in the evening. Today, it was even warmer, nearly 60 degrees F. Early December isn’t always like this.

It is fairly cold at night, however, and I needed to go out into the back yard briefly at about 12:30 a.m. on December 1, and there he was: Orion, riding high in the south, followed by his loyal dog. That mark of coming winter isn’t going to change according to the vicissitudes of local weather.

The mild daytime temps meant I could string Christmas lights on the front yard bushes without freezing any fingers. Out of two outdoor strings with C9 lights—another string is battery-power LEDs—fully 13 bulbs were dead. So I went to a large retailer, looking for replacement bulbs. They had none. I looked fairly carefully to make sure, and found none, but a lot of full sets for sale.

What’s the thinking? Buy a new string, jack. We’ve got quasi-slave labor in Shanxi Province to keep busy.

I found replacement bulbs elsewhere, though not quite enough to replace all my missing ones, since buyers had cleared most of them from the shelves. Seems like there’s still a demand for C9s, despite the movement to LEDs.