Tag Archives: unpleasant weather

All the Boards Did Shrink Again

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It rained from about midnight to 6 a.m. on Thursday, one of the heaviest I’ve seen here in the northwest suburbs, but not the heaviest. Just my impression. I don’t feel like looking up the rainfall totals measured at O’Hare for then and now.

Thursday’s rain also compares to the time we went camping in Wisconsin, in summer of ’07, and during our last night in the tent it rained and rained and rained (which I called “two-fisted, he-man rain”). As for the tent, guaranteed to keep you dry indeed.

On Friday morning, skies were gray, but at least it wasn’t raining any more. On Saturday morning, the morning greeted us with a light dusting of snow. It melted after a short time, but even this far north, that’s a little unusual.

Much mud is still around. The dog is very fond of it.

Hints of Spring

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Despite the nearness of the equinox — which will inevitably be called ‘the first day of spring” when it arrives — winter grinds on here. Can’t call it spring. Large snowflakes came down much of this morning, though it wasn’t quite cold enough for them to last. Subfreezing temps expected at night for days and days to come.

The latest gas bill arrived the other day to drive home the fact that we’re still warming the house using natural gas. For the period February 12 through March 14 (30 days), 245.38 therms went for that purpose (including a few for cooking), or roughly 24.5M Btus. The bill also tells me that the average temp was 33 degrees F. for the period in question, compared with 54 degrees for roughly the same period last year. Natural gas prices are up, too, at least as reflected in the statement. Not sure what to make of that; last I heard, there was a glut.

I did see the tips of a few croci today, though not in my yard. And not long ago I heard a woodpecker, pecking at a tree in search of a meal. Only hints of spring, but better than nothing.

Come May, We’ll be in Clover

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Winter refuses to go quietly. Today was windy and raw, and just before dark, snowy. Not a vast amount, just enough to re-whiten the ground. But even so, winter is losing its grip. Before the snow started, I walked by a front yard that had the remains of a snowman: a lump of unmelted snow, a hat on top of that, and a carrot and some apples on the ground nearby. (Ann told me the apples were the snowman’s “buttons.”)

Got a note from a friendly yard-care company rubber-banded to my front doorknob the other day, offering its services in the spring. The note featured a checklist of “undesired weeds” in our yard, and according to the checklist we have chickweed, henbit, dandelions, and clover. How did this company know what I have in my yard? Yard spies wandering down the sidewalks last summer, making notes? It’s too soon yet for drones to do that, but someday no doubt they will.

Never mind. Those last two are easy enough, but I had to look up the others. Chickweed refers to a lot of different plants, so it’s one of those unhelpful common names that spurred Carolus Linnaeus to do what he did. Henbit is Lamium amplexicaule. I’m pretty sure we do in fact have henbit, dandelions, and clover in the yard. But they missed our pockets of mint, maybe because most of those are in the back yard, and yard spies who go there are trespassing.

But why are those three weeds? I’ve written about dandelions. As for clover, it’s clover. We’re not talking kudzu here. Clover is good. The expression “in clover,” though a bit old-fashioned, reflects that.  The OED puts it this way: “to live (or be) in clover: ‘to live luxuriously; clover being extremely delicious and fattening to cattle.’ ” We don’t have cattle, but who can look down on those little green plants mixed in with other grasses, with their three leaves and hardy constitutions, and think weed?

Letter from the Alamo

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Remember the Alamo. This year the Feb. 24, 1836, letter by William Barret Travis — the famed Victory or Death letter — has been on display at the Alamo since Feb. 23 (and continuing until tomorrow), on loan from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. The Alamo has even set up a web site for the letter, which is here, though I don’t know how long it will be up. Apparently the letter hasn’t been to the Alamo since Travis sent it.

I might have braved the lines to take a look at it, but I’ve been further north, putting up with late winter. Yesterday, of course, was a big snow. What happens after a big snow? Plowing on the street by the village, shoveling on my driveway by me, and occasional snowball fights among the girls. Once paths have been cleared, everyone’s schedule returns to normal, as they did today.

Being a March snow, I’m expecting meltage soon. The only unusual thing about the weather this year was the paucity of snow in early winter, compared to its abundance later on.

The Big March Snow

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Snow! Not much more to report on this March 5. Both elementary and high schools were closed, even though the snowfall really didn’t get under way until late in the morning, and Yuriko stayed home too. When the snow started to fall, it came with gusto. But not much wind. Just steady snow, hour after hour.

I didn’t get around to shoveling until about 8:30. After dark, but with light bouncing off the snow, it wasn’t that dark. There must be two feet on the ground now, counting this snow and the previous buildups.

March snows aren’t that strange, but ones so vigorous are a little uncommon. The last time I remember so much coming down this month was in early March 1998. We had so much that we postponed out meeting with the home inspector at the house we would eventually buy in Westmont that year.

Ten Years Later

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Big snow predicted for tomorrow. Not a blizzard, mind you, but six inches maybe. The weathermen try to act impressed by that, but it isn’t impressive. I haven’t checked to see if the Weather Channel is trying to stick a name on it. Last time it was a noted cartoon fish (or submariner). Maybe it’ll be Winter Storm Magilla.

Oddly enough, and apropos of nothing, I never watched The Magilla Gorilla Show, though I can’t say that about other awful output of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon factory. Or at least I have no memory of it. Not sure why. I was squarely in its demographic, at least by the end of the show’s run in 1967. But there must have been something else on at the same time that I, and probably more importantly, that my brothers wanted to watch. I never even heard of the show until much later, when I listened to the theme song on a TeeVee Toons collection.

Just out of curiosity, I counted up the number of posts between the day I first posted back at Blogger, February 21, 2003, and today. It’s only a milestone because we use base 10, but base 10 it is. The total is 2,435, or almost exactly two times every three days. Not so much across the span of 10 years. I couldn’t say how many words that is, but at 300 per entry — a seat-of-the-pants estimate — that puts it around 730,000.

Two hundred words a day. Eh, any fool can do that. Even if you count the for-pay words I’ve done in the last 10 years, that might only be 800 to 1,000 words a day. That doesn’t take one into the league of Asimovian compulsive writers.

But quantity isn’t everything. I’ve enjoyed blogging in particular about those few places I’ve been over the last decade. With any luck — because life is impermanent — I’ll record impressions of a few more places here over the next decade (or in a successor blog, because blogs are impermanent, too.)

The Bleak Mid-February

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Yesterday was almost warm, but winds and a dusting of snow blew through overnight and brought back standard February bleak.

The only colorful back-yard bits are man-made: plastic planters kicking around, empty of plants and void of use. For now. It’s a little hard to believe, but in four months or so, the back yard will look like this.

Boerne Ramble

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Sleet came down this afternoon, followed by heavy rain. It’s still raining, last time I looked. Or maybe that’s an ice-rain mix. There’s bound to be ice on the sidewalks and roads tomorrow, and probably ice on my old car. It’ll probably be a good day to stay home. A day on which the benefits of working at home are clear.

In early January 1983, not long before I returned to Tennessee to complete my formal education, some friends and I went out to the vicinity of Boerne, Texas, for the day. We might have passed through that town, but mostly I remember visiting Lester’s family’s ranch, which was out that way. We tooled around in a beaten-up van. At one point, we had to get out and push the thing to a downward slope, so that we could get it running.

Everyone ought to have that kind of experience with a motor vehicle sometime in his or her life. My experience was ideal: it wasn’t my vehicle, and there were a lot of other people pushing too.

Pictured: Stephen (RIP), Nancy, Debbie, Eric, Kirk, Tom and me. Lester took the shot and later sent us prints.

Honour’d and Blest be the Evergreen Pine

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Bitter cold this morning. At about 6 a.m. both Yuriko and I heard a loud pop from the direction of the back yard. I thought it was something hitting the something else nearby, she thought it was an “explosion.” She was right. The night before I’d neglected to take in some of the soda cans that had been chilling on the deck, and one of them exploded. Even now bits of frozen soda linger on the planks.

As usual, the Atlantic has gathered together a remarkable set of photographs about a theme – in this case, the inauguration yesterday. I was surprised by how fast it was up, since I first looked at them at about 8 p.m. last night (some have been added since then). That’s a lot of pictures to upload and, especially, caption.

I was glad to see Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter looking (pic 22) so remarkably hale. The Clintons were also there, as to be expected, and I can understand why the ailing George HW Bush wasn’t in attendance. What’s up with his son, who also wasn’t there? We can give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wanted to be with his father. Or maybe he figured, eh, been to too many already, which would probably include his father becoming vice president and president, his own inaugurations, and the 2009 inauguration.

Just before 11 a.m. yesterday, I made sure both of the girls were with me to watch a bit of the event, even though it was really just for show, the actual swearing in having occurred in the Blue Room of the White House the day before. Just for show, but important. It’s churlish to begrudge any president the rituals of inauguration, whatever you think of his politics. A highly visible and ritualized transition, even if it’s a second-term transition, helps maintain the stability of the government. President Adams might have been peevish in not attending Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, but at least he didn’t try to stop it.

Fibber McGee’s Garage

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Winter warm through most of Friday and Saturday – in the 50s at times – and then freezing rain came on Saturday night, followed by normal January temps again plus ice. Not major ice, just enough to leave thin sheets underfoot here and there, which I coated with sand. Why isn’t sand more popular for dealing with icy patches? It doesn’t melt the ice, but it neutralizes the slip danger, which is what matters.

But I couldn’t deal with the ice sheet on the Sienna with sand. Lilly wanted to practice some driving on Sunday, so I made her chip parts of the ice off the windows with me. If you’re going to have a car in the North, and a two-car garage organized by Fibber McGee so that only one car goes in there, you’ll have to de-ice your car windows sometimes.

I wonder how long Fibber McGee’s closet will be a widely understood reference. Or has it already passed into obscurity, and I didn’t get the memo? It’s easy to ignore that kind of change. I do it all the time. Then again, you can’t ever know what’s going to die out in the age of YouTube. (This is cheating, since it isn’t the radio show, but it’s still worth a link.)