Is it winter yet?
In New England, the fact that the calendar-based beginnings and endings of the seasons rarely seem to line up with the actual changes in the weather is often cause for snickering.
Fall begins before the leaves turn. And spring? Don’t even go there—it’s still winter whenever it arrives. Summer comes closer to the right time. But then there’s that old New England joke that there are two seasons here: winter and the Fourth of July.
Well, although it’s not yet winter (tune in tomorrow for the kickoff day), we are certainly proving the truth of that old saying. And this time it’s no joke. It’s been winter, winter, winter, for quite some time now, no matter what the calendar says.
The ice storm last week was so traumatic—a few unlucky people are still without power—that we start the season in a depleted state. And now this weekend comes a large storm sandwich: a big one yesterday from which everyone is digging out, as flurries continue to fly; and one tomorrow.
Tomorrow’s is particularly worrisome. It will begin as snow in most of New England and change to rain in an unpredictable line of—you guessed it—ice. Ice is what tends to cause power outages because the weight of it snaps trees and breaks lines quite readily.
To top it all off, it is the holidays. Right now it’s not beginning to look a lot like Christmas; it does look a lot like Christmas. Only northern New England usually has a white Christmas, typically. But this year all of New England will be able to hum that tune and not just be dreaming.
That’s about the only consolation, as far as I’m concerned. I’m trying to travel to the West Coast for the holidays, and I had to cancel and remake my reservation for Monday, which seems to be one of the few snow-free days predicted in the next week.
Usually I rather like winter in New England. Despite the snow, it is typically very beautiful, and there are many sunny days where the light is especially brilliant. Right now we haven’t had many of those. How about you?
Two causes for amusement:
– what all panicking news channels call a “snowstorm” is just a simple snowfalling. Not windy, not particularly cold – today accuweather shows 23F for NY, and 39F for tomorrow. Not much snow, either – the ground is lightly “flowered”. I’m just told that in MI there is 16″ of snowfall: that’s what I call winter.
-that every year ice on power lines comes as complete surprise and everyone regards it as an absolutely unpredictable disaster. Which gives a chance to utility companies to work on overtime rate and generally pose as Saviors of Humanity – when all they had to do, once and for years to come – is to put their power lines underground.
moved to ohio in october, and haven’t seen the sun in 4 weeks. usually i like cloudy weather, but the absolute failure of the sun to make any appearance has left me extremely grim. they say it’s not usually like this…
Here in NORTHERN California (let’s just pretend L.A. et al. don’t exist) I am putting my lights on my house and breaking a sweat. But three mornings ago the horse troughs and dog buckets were all frozen over. A couple hours’ drive to the east there can be deep drifts on the ski slopes while it is sunny and more or less dry at home. I start to wonder why people would live anywhere else when I remember, oh damn, thirty million people have already had the same thought. Honestly, if we could only get the word out that California sucks, you-all can go back where you came from. Oh well. My antecedents are New England — sometime in the late 1800s they figured something out, I guess.
After living in New England for 27 years, about 20 years ago I became convinced that NE has the worst weather in the US.
So about 10 years ago I’m doing my annual judging of the state science fair. There before me was a project in which the student went back into the archives to find storm track information. She then plotted on a large US map all the storm track for the last 100 years. Guess what? 90% of all the storms went through New England! Didn’t matter if they started in the Gulf, southern California, Washington state, or Canada. Every where else had about a 50% shot at the storms; we get them all!
That convinced me to get the hell out of here when I retire. No wonder native New Englanders are so crusty!
I’m currently in middle Missouri, and the wind has been fierce the last 36 hours. This is coming your way. Hope all that snow gets a nice coating of ice on top, or you’ll see some nice drifts.
Good old fashioned snow storm here in Minnesota. As Al Franken’s allies in the courts give him the votes of Minnesotans too stupid to correctly fill out a ballot (fill in a circle with a felt tip pen) at least the global warming nazis have been frozen into silence.
Well, we got the 1 foot range here in middle of CT yesterday. Fun fun fun and more to come!!!
Puget Sound is experiencing extremely cold and snowy weather right now. Normally any snow events are short lived and the snow soon melts as temps go above freezing. It has been below feezing here for ten days now. A very rare event. Have to go back 50 years to find an equivalent weather pattern. It has been 9-21 degrees today and there is a new snow storm headed in for tonight. We may get as much as 12″ more with 30-50 knot winds.
The worst part about it all is that the cities and counties in this area do not have much snow removal equipment. So the roads are generally in bad shape for drivers. Then there are the drivers. Most people seem to lose their memory of how to drive on slick roads because snow is usually a fleeting event. Not this time. It’s a jungle out there with many fender benders and some fatalities.
We expect temps to go above freezing on Sunday, but what melts will refreeze over night. It may be next Wednesday before we go above freezing for twenty four hours and things begin to return to normal. (Normal being lots of cold drizzle interspersed with hard rain.)
Of course everyone here knows that this hard freeze is due to anthropogenic global warming. Damn those CO2 spewing power plants! LOLs.
Here in central New York State We have missed the ice storms and the power outages and gotten snow instead, which may be why I am loving this winter so far. It’s been looking a lot like Christmas most of the time since before Thanksgiving. Little caps of snow are heaped on every weed. The chickadees shake snow off the twigs when they alight by the bird feeder. On my way back from the horrendously jammed but inexplicably cheerful mall tonight (NEVER NEVER go to the mall on the Saturday before Christmas. — just take my word for it) little flakes of snow were twinkling past the ruby and emerald traffic lights as beautifully as if they were stained glass windows. I’m telling you, it’s beautiful.
now come February, when it’s still like this, ask me about it and I’ll growl at you. But for now, it’s Christmas, it’s snowy, it’s cold, it’s perfect.
We are experiencing temps in the high 60’s / low 70’s this past week here in NC – but I ain’t crowing too much as we were experiencing Jan/Feb weather right before this front moved through and even had snow this past November!
It’s also quite likely after this system moves through the temps will drop like a rock again back down to normal ranges.
I don’t remember ever having snow in November before….
Anyway, good thing the planet is warming up, as all this cold must be a figment of our imaginations…..
Christmas in a tropical, predominantly Muslim country, where the daytime temperature is more or less 90 degrees year-round, and the only variable is whether it rains or not (it’s rainy season now) can make it difficult to get into the Christmas spirit. Not that the locals don’t try. My apartment complex has a nice Christmas tree in the lobby, as do most of the large shopping malls. The Muslims who follow the tolerant local traditions also help out (the department store salesgirl happily wearing a Santa hat over her jilbab (headscarf) was a bit of religious cognitive dissonance that only seems to occur in Indonesia. Hard to explain, you just have to live here).
Having grown up in Michigan, I’m all too familiar with blizzards and ice storms. I like the “White Christmas” aspect winter weather, but I’ve risked my life too many times on icy roads and shoveled way too much snow out of my driveway to ever enjoy “the white stuff” again. Good luck, Neo in getting out on your travels, and good luck also to all those in the path of the upcoming ice storm, in staying warm and safe this Christmas.
Grew up in Miami where we had 2 seasons: Hurricane Season and Not-Hurricane Season.
Decided to go true North for college: North Carolina (“flatlads: Raleigh-Durham area) — Hot as Hades in Summer and until late Fall — then truly gray and dreary. But one light dusting of snow, and everything shut down, including classes. A peek into Duke Gardens invariably revealed blissful collegiates having the time of their lives on make-do cafeteria tray sleds sliding down the slightest inclines!
Somehow I felt the urge to settle down in the real North — NYC. And I can’t remember a single snowfall that didn’t (and still doesn’t — some 30 + years later — make me giddy as a kid seeing his/her her first snowfall. I don’t thin I’ll ever get enough (but then again, I don’t have to shovel and paths or driveways!)
(I will admit to finding it all not quite so inviting after a few days of city traffic and plowing, daytime melting and nighttime re-freezing, leaving every street corner a mix of black ice and slush…..but a good pair of waterproof boots makes it palatable)
Even now in my fifties, I still feel the letdown when I miss a snowstorm if I’m visiting family in FL…. While most people’s idea of nirvana is a warm beachfront, mine is still a climate with 4 seasons and a generous dose of snowfall, particularly when I have a terrific fireplace to cozy up to (one thing I miss here in the city, but will be a must upon my impending move elsewhere).
“Usually I rather like winter in New England. Despite the snow, it is typically very beautiful, and there are many sunny days where the light is especially brilliant. Right now we haven’t had many of those. How about you?”
Winter is a BIG part of why I plan to retire in Hawaii. The Farmers’ Almanac is calling for a particularly harsh one; based upon the Autumn weather thus far, I can easily believe it… 🙁
Reporting in from southeastern Pennsylvania:
We rarely get white Christmases (Christmii?) here. So far this year we’ve only had a couple of light accumulations of snow. This past Monday the temperature got up into the mid-60s and the next day we had freezing rain and snow. The most recent storm, on Friday, started out as sleet but ended up as rain.
I do like living here. We get a little bit of every kind of weather, but not too much of anything.
We are going to southern California on Monday, just in time to catch the latest Pacific storm. Perched on a cliff overlooking the surfers at Dana Point somehow makes it worth the trip despite the gloomy weather.
Funny thing how our weather situations seem to mirror the economic one.
I bet if we went back to 5 minutes a day of a weatherman drawing on a map with chalk, we’d all feel a lot less traumatised by the weather and maybe even have more money in our pockets.
“I bet if we went back to 5 minutes a day of a weatherman drawing on a map with chalk…”
I remember a weather guy named Sonny Eliot who used to do the forecasts for the NBC TV affiliate in Detroit back in the ’60s and early ’70s. He was something of a clown who injected a corny kind of humor into his weather reports, and always used a piece of chalk to make a squeaking sound to pinpoint one town or another in the (removable) Keweenaw Peninsula on his Michigan-shaped chalkboard. His forecasts were pretty good, and he was also a fairly senior Weather Officer in the Air National Guard/Air Force Reserve, so he didn’t joke around when it came to the serious warnings. Don’t know why, but I always loved his forecasts. Maybe for the same reason I loved the 3 Stooges. But the weather never seemed that bad when Sonny was giving the forecast.
Humor aside, I consider Dec 1 the first day of winter in NH (Sept 1 the first day of fall).
By “west” I hope you mean “southwest” and not “northwest.” We just went Boston -> Oregon … and I’m happy to say we arrived. But we left many behind in the airports.
Sitting here in New York: we had four inches on Friday, which delighted me (Southern expatriate who has always loved snow–we never get enough of it). I particularly love to get a white Christmas. When we were little, living in South Carolina, it snowed one Christmas Eve, the ONLY time that ever happened. My grandfather was the first to notice; he went to the window, peered out, and looked back over his shoulder and smiled. “It’s snowing,” he said.
We went wild with excitement. Ran out into the yard, whooping, and put our tongues out to catch flakes. We only got a light powdering on the grass, but it was rarer than fairy dust, and just as magical.
Today, we got hours of sodding rain. Which melted the pretty snow into slush and will freeze into nasty ice overnight (low is predicted to be 18 degrees). I hope the idiots who rooted for RAIN are satisfied!
Bahum-Bug.
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