Tag Archives: dangerous weather

The Witch of November 2019

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It hasn’t just been cold for November since Monday, temps have been reaching into the realm of damn cold, briefly dropping below zero Fahrenheit early this morning, or maybe into imaginary numbers. Later in the day, it reached a balmy 25 degrees or so. Bah.

It’s a major early winter weather event, now gripping much of the nation. Guess that means I’m a part of something larger than myself. They say that’s important for self-esteem, or happiness, or something, but I don’t think weather events count toward that sense of belonging.

Also, northern Illinois got about three inches of snow on Monday. Not the first time I’ve seen Veterans Day-Armistice Day snow, but more fell than in 2013. At least we didn’t get hit with something along the lines of the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940 or the Big Blow of 1913, both of which showed the power of the Witch of November.

This Gelid Day

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I got up this morning and before long pulled up the Weather Underground page for my suburb. At about 9 a.m. the temperature was minus 23 F. “Feels like minus 43,” the site helpfully added, since there was some wind.

At O’Hare, the low was one degree colder, it seems. “This morning’s minimum of 24 below zero was the coldest in Chicago in the 36 years since the morning of January 20, 1985, when Chicago’s all-time record low of minus 27 was recorded,” WGN reports. Even in Nashville, I remember that things were pretty cold around that time in ’85.

Not to worry, we had a high of minus 15 F. to look forward to today. That happened around 1 in the afternoon, but as of about 7 p.m. we were back to 17 below. Remarkably, the weather savants say that the local air will be above freezing by the weekend. Hope so.

Early in the afternoon, the dog wanted to go out to do what dogs do outside. So I let her out. During the minute or so she spent in the frozen landscape, I couldn’t resist the urge to document the scene — as quickly as possible through a door that was open for a few seconds.
No adjustment of the image necessary. Looks like the camera also caught light dispersing through ice crystals in the gelid air.

At temps like this, it’s easy to anthropomorphize the cold. It feels like the cold is pressing on all the doors and windows, trying to put its icy fingers through the cracks, eager to invade the house and equalize the temperature outside and inside. As if central heating is an affront to its idea of the way things should be.

My work desk faces an outside window. Even wearing socks, I could feel the temps under the desk to be lower than usual today. Behind one of our kitchen cabinets is an exterior wall. The air was noticeably cooler in the cabinet today. Last night, I heard the house pop and creak a little as the outside temps dipped below zero. That is unnerving.

Some years ago, an occasional BTST reader said, you sure write about the weather a lot. The implication was, I think, why are you wasting your time with trivia like that?

I’ve thought about that question occasionally since then. Odd what some people consider trivial. Like the weather. Which is the state of the atmosphere in which we live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for a handful of astronauts for a little while. You’d think it would be worth some attention.

Actually, in this iteration of BTST at least, weather is a main category in only about 10 percent of the postings: 132 of a total of 1,342. Seems like a healthy amount of attention to me.

Of that category, only 18 postings (like today) are tagged “dangerous weather,” all of which I’ve experienced myself. Winter storms, hurricanes, very heavy rains, high heat, usw. (Well, I’ve never been near a hurricane, but I did hear a typhoon rush by outside in Osaka.) “Unpleasant weather” gets 43 tags while “pleasant weather” gets 23, so I guess I’m not one to accentuate the positive when it comes to atmospheric conditions.

Ignore the weather at your peril. The unnamed protagonist in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” didn’t give it much thought, and look where it got him: frozen to death.

“Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.”

Reading About the Wazir of Wham in the Pit of Winter

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Sliding into the pit of winter. The abyss. The Mariana Trench. With any luck temps won’t be any colder in February.

The snow was intense enough this morning that school was cancelled and garbage pickup didn’t happen on our street today as scheduled, though the recycle truck came more-or-less on time in the mid-morning, even before the plows.

I decided to go ahead and read the biography of Babe Ruth that I have handy, Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend by Kal Wagenheim (1974). Not overly scholarly, but fun. A book about good-time Babe Ruth that isn’t fun isn’t trying very hard. Also, it was written long enough ago that plenty of old timers were still around to tell stories about Ruth.

Been a while since I read any baseball books. Can’t remember the last one. Might have been You Gotta Have Wa.

One amusing thing to read about is the array of nicknames that sports writers invented for the Babe. The Sultan of Swat or the Bambino, everyone knows (or should), but less-well known is the Colossus of Clout or the Behemoth of Bust. Or the Caliph of Clout, Wazir of Wham, Maharajah of Mash, Rajah of Rap, Mammoth of Maul, Wali of Wallop, the Mauling Monarch and the Terrible Titan.

Cow Ride at the Mall

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Australia Day has come and gone. Oz is reportedly suffering a viciously hot summer this year. Adelaide, a pleasant place in my recollection, seems to be getting hit especially hard.

Meanwhile, here in North America, or at least my part of it, after being a slacker for most of December and part of January, winter is hitting hard. Dead ahead, according to the NWS on Sunday evening:

WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 9 PM THIS EVENING TO 6 PM CST MONDAY… Heavy snow and blowing snow tonight with freezing drizzle and blowing snow likely at times Monday. Snow rates overnight into early morning are likely to reach up to an inch per hour at times. This will result in very low visibilities and rapid snow accumulations into the early morning commute. Total snow accumulations of 3 to 7 inches and ice accumulations of a light glaze expected.

This after subzero temps on Friday, and ahead of temps as low as minus 20 by Tuesday (Fahrenheit, the only scale that’s made for humans). Still, on Saturday things had warmed up to low double-digits, so we were out for a while. The three of us and a friend of Ann’s, on the occasion, not quite precisely, of Ann’s birthday. Nice to get out of the house.

We ate at Gabuttø Burger at Ann’s request. Since I discovered the place at the Mitsuwa food court, the Japanese burgerie has moved into a small strip center on a busy street in Rolling Meadows and seems to be doing well there. We visit a few times a year.

Then to a northwest suburban mall. Not the biggest one, the 2.1 million-square-foot Woodfield, but a smaller one. The one we visited isn’t a dying mall, but it has lost an anchor or two, along with some of its inline stores.

Still, the mall is doing what it can. It now sports a number of places to take children and entertain them, for instance. Not playplaces in the middle of the mall, but small entertainment venues that used to be more conventional retail.

Including a place where you can rent animal-ride scooters for a few minutes. She’s not in the main demographic, but according to Ann, it was a birthday thing to do, so she and her friend spent 10 minutes tooling around the mall.

She picked a cow. Looked like she had a jolly time of it.

Thursday Bunkum

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Our latest snow was less convenient than previous ones this winter, falling in mid-week. I spent a fair chunk of Wednesday shoveling more snow around, this time wetter masses than the last snowfall. Now an arctic blast is blasting its way toward northern Illinois. Subzero temps ahead.

Ah, fun. We’ve been down this road before, of course.

I just found out today that the Emperor of Japan is going to abdicate on April 30. That was news in December, but I missed it. I chanced across the information in a copy of the bilingual Chicago Shimpo, a paper Yuriko picks up for free periodically at the Mitsuwa grocery store.

The Imperial Household Agency, known for its mossback ways, is on board with that?  Yet abdication from the Chrysanthemum Throne isn’t unknown. The most recent abdication was of Kōkaku, who quit in 1817. Pretty recent, considering the longevity of the Yamato Dynasty.

In even earlier times, back when the emperor was more of a political football than in recent centuries, one emperor was sometimes forced out to make way for another.

Now that I’ve finished reading Stalin — which I read after John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (2014), an excellent book — I’ve decided to read some more biographies. A biography bender. Next I want to pick one from around the house, one that I haven’t read.

My choices, at least those I’ve found so far, include works on Francis Bacon, Benedict Arnold and Babe Ruth.

Something called Indywire asserted recently that: Coen Brothers Shock With ‘Buster Scruggs’ Oscar Nomination

I’m not shocked. I’ve seen five of the six stories in the The Ballad of Buster Scuggs so far and they’re really good, especially “Meal Ticket” and “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” Not that being good necessarily gets a movie nominations, but it helps.

All the stories get the Coen Brothers treatment, so you know that something bad is going to happen to at least one of the characters. In the “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” the feeling was particularly poignant, because as the story moved along, both the man and woman evolved into remarkably sympathetic characters. Then one of the dangers of the 19th century smites them.

Parts of the movie were based on sources much closer to the 19th century than our own, such as “The Girl Who Got Rattled” by Stewart Edward White and Jack London’s “All Gold Cañon,” while other parts evoke cowboy pictures of yore.

That only goes to show that there’s a vast and largely untapped galaxy of source material for movies — books, short stories, historic events, myths, graphic novels and on and on. Do moviemakers show any interest in mining these riches? Mostly not, seems like, and if they do, commercial pressures disabuse them of the notion. The Coens are exceptions. I’m glad they’re able to make the movies they want to.

Snowstorm Aftermath on I-57

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Some minor transitions today. Early in the day, after we all had a fine breakfast at the local branch of pancake specialist Walker Bros. — ahead of the Sunday rush — I took Lilly back to Champaign to continue her junior-year education. Later in the day, I took down this season’s Christmas tree, which as usual left a trail of needles all the way from the living room to the curb.

On Saturday, snow had fallen. The most since late November, but even so we only got a few inches here. We were at the northern edge of a larger storm that barreled eastward through Missouri, Iowa, downstate Illinois and Indiana. So the closer we got to Champaign the next day, the more snow we saw covering the ground.

Here’s the I-57 rest area near Buckley, Illinois, where six (eight?) inches or so covered the ground.

Not an epic storm, but enough to cause trouble. Today I-57 was clear and unobstructed. It must have been a different story 24 hours earlier. We saw five, maybe six abandoned cars at various angles off the side of the road between Kankakee and Champaign, part of the aftermath of the previous day’s weather. That included one whose front was banged up badly when it hit a support pillar of an overpass.

Winter Storm Brewing

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The latest from the National Weather Service, early Sunday evening (November 25), for my location:

A powerful winter storm will bring blizzard conditions and very heavy snow to portions of the area. Accumulations will exceed a foot in some areas, including across the northwest suburbs and portions of north central Illinois. Most importantly, conditions will deteriorate rapidly this evening from northwest to southeast. Snowfall rates will exceed 2 inches per hour tonight which will allow for quick accumulation on roadways.

Or to put it in less official terms: Winter says he’s back, and he’ll not be trifled with.

I made a point of getting home in the late afternoon today after taking Lilly back to UIUC, before dark and before the rain turned into snow. Reports on the radio told me that the storm was then slamming into Missouri and was headed east, more or less. It all gave some urgency to the drive.

Still, I took time to take Lilly to a Chinese restaurant in Champaign for lunch before I left. Across the street from the place I noticed what you might call a hyperlocal billboard. It says The Chief. Yesterday, Today, Forever. (Punctuation added, but not all caps, because I’m that kind of guy.)

The Chief isn’t mentioned by name, but I know the sign wants passersby to be nostalgic for Chief Illiniwek, mascot of UIUC from 1926 to 2007. Currently the school has no mascot, or symbol, not officially anyway.

More October Scenes

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Heavy rains today, but nothing like the Florida panhandle’s getting. Looks like heavy damage in the area.

I have some fond memories of the likes of Seaside and Apalachicola and Port St. Joe. I even think we stopped for lunch in Mexico Beach, which is where Michael’s eye came ashore today. That town is essentially a cluster of buildings along US 98 as it runs next to the ocean. Mexico Beach might not be there any more.

Here in the North, geese forage for food in the suburbs, making their noise and leaving their droppings.

Halloween decorations are going up. I haven’t spotted many inflatables, which is a welcome reversal of that trend. A deflating of it. Most of the decorations don’t involve lights, but there are a few on our block.

This particular house has always been decked out for Halloween, including the faux cemetery. The residents have never been inclined toward inflatables.

1 Jiao, 1980

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From the NWS at 3 p.m. today, for northeastern Illinois: WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 PM THIS EVENING TO 9 PM CST FRIDAY…

“Heavy snow expected. Travel will be very difficult to impossible at times, including during the morning commute on Friday. Total snow accumulations of 8 to 14 inches, with localized higher amounts are expected.”

Well, that ought to be fun. Snow had already started as of 6 p.m. Thursday. Fortunately, all of us can stay home tomorrow.

One more small banknote for now. Small in value, about 1.6 cents, and small physically, 4½ by 2 inches. The 1 jiao of the People’s Republic of China. The PRC. I miss it being called red China, just a little.

1 jiao is 0.1 yuan. So you could say that this is a Chinese dime. The gentlemen depicted on the note are stalwart examples of Gaoshan and Manchu men, presumably looking boldly toward the socialist future. Manchu, I’d heard of. Manchu Dynasty and all that. Gaoshan, on the other hand, I had to look up. Seems that’s a term for Taiwanese aborigines.

Dated 1980, but in fact part of the fourth series of the renminbi (as opposed to FECs), which were issued from 1987 to 1997. So I might have picked this up in China. I know I have a few 1 jiao aluminum coins from our visit. Or the note might have been among the bunch o’ cheapies I got more recently.

Harvey and Irma

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Harvey and Irma sound like an elderly couple living next to your grandparents 50 years ago. Actually, Irma was a woman living in the house next to my grandparents in Alamo Heights back in the mid-century. I have no idea whether she was a widow or, as my grandma would have put it without being remotely judgmental, an old maid.

When I visited my grandma as a young boy, Irma was kind enough to let me play in her yard and even on her front porch, and I think gave me snacks sometimes. I’m certain Irma is long gone, like grandma, but when I walked by her old house last year, it looked a lot like it used to, unlike my hard-to-recognize grandparents’ house.

Out of curiosity, and because I was busy today and so had the urge to spend time profitlessly, I checked the list of hurricane names at the National Hurricane Center, which is maintained by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization. Tropical cyclone names have a six-year repeating pattern, alternating between female and male names in alphabetical order, except names beginning with Q, U, X, Y or Z, which are skipped all together. I remember when men’s names joined the list in 1979; it sounded odd at first, but normal pretty soon after.

So how many names on the Atlantic hurricane list are as old-fashioned as Irma? A few. Hazel, Beulah, Edna, Agnes, and Eloise have been retired, but Ida and Bertha are still on the list. Arguably names like Florence and Karen and Joyce are on their way out, but not yet. At least the WMO hasn’t picked up the likes of Brooklyn, Madison or Nevaeh. I’d go along with Moon Unit, though.

If Irma’s as fierce as it seems to be, the name will probably be retired, along with Harvey. That would leave an I name and an H name open. Alas, Igor is out — there was a storm of that name in 2010. Hortense is out as well, after a 1996 storm of that name.