Category Archives: Weather

At Least I Won a Coffee Cup

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By mid-February, looking out at scenes like this is pretty tiresome. But there it is.
Feb 15, 2016Saturday was bitterly cold, even for February, which nixed any notion I had of going to Chinatown to watch the Chinese New Year’s parade. I’ve never been to one of those, so I toyed with the idea. But not when temps are single-digit Fahrenheit.

Sunday, snow. Monday, gloom. But at least we have the option of warm beverages in well-wrought ceramic cups, such as these.

cupsThe black one with the Sam Hurt illustration of a prehistoric creature and his cup — “Early Breakfast” — was a thoughtful Christmas present this year from my nephew Dees and his girlfriend Eden.

The blue one — “Take Time for Fun” — I picked up at a park district facility last week. It was a prize.

A week earlier, two days before the Super Bowl, we’d visited the same facility, and I noticed a contest in progress. Guess the final score of the Big Game and get three months added to your membership. Write your guess down on a slip of paper with your name and address, and put it in a big box (refreshingly low tech, that).

So I guessed Denver 24, Charlotte 17. I was vaguely aware that Charlotte was the favorite, but I still wanted Denver to win. Not because I cared anything about the game, but so I could complete a slide show like this the next week, after having predicted that Denver would win.

As for the numbers themselves, I pulled them out of the air, though I made them football-plausible. 24 = three touchdowns + extra points + one field goal, while 17 = two touchdowns + extra points + one field goal.

I proceeded not to watch the Super Bowl or any of its ridiculously expensive commercials. On Monday, a woman from the park district called to tell me I’d won a coffee cup. Everyone who guessed 24 as the score for Denver got one, it seems — eight or 10 people. Two people, she said, had gotten both scores right and won the membership extension.

One thing people say at this point is that “I’ve never won anything,” but it isn’t so for me. Among other things, in grade school I guessed the number of jelly beans in a jar and won the beans — I picked my house address as the number — and once I was a member of a trivia contest team at a corporate meeting, and won some movie tickets, though that was partly because of my knowledge of obscure facts, not just blind luck.

Midwinter Entertainment: Hop on Pop

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Cold but not too cold over the weekend. A dusting of snow for us as the major North American storm of the month blew through the South and headed for the East. On Saturday at about 6 pm, the full moon off to the east peeked out from behind a rack of thin clouds. In the foreground, at least from my front yard, stood the dark outline of a bare tree. Very Caspar David Friedrich.

A fragment from a letter from about 15 years ago.

January 16, 2001

Had yesterday off. That’s the first time anyone’s ever given me MLK Day off, and I spent most of it at home, entertaining Lilly, or being entertained. She is easily amused. For instance, spinning coins on a flat surface is a great entertainment for her. Lately she’s learned to do this herself.

Also, often when I find myself horizontal in some way — on the couch, say — she finds me too, and conducts a physics experiment to see what happens when her mass, about 16 kilos these days, acquires enough kinetic energy to wallop into my stomach, which has a considerable mass of its own.

Here in the present, there are no more toddlers in the house, but the dog, whose mass is about 18 kilos, often hops onto my stomach as I lie on the couch. This is only an issue when I’m dozing soundly enough not to hear the tell-tale jingle of her dog tags as she approaches the couch.

Not Too Cheap to Meter

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On Saturday I got one of ComEd’s periodic notices about our household electricity consumption. “You used 14% less electricity than your efficient neighbors” (the company’s bold), the letter tells me, during the period from November 20 to December 22, 2015. By golly, that’s awfully green of us, but I can’t think what we did any differently last month than any other time.

For the year, however, “You used 7% more electricity than your efficient neighbors. This costs you about $46 extra per year.” Dang.

My neighbors, at least according to ComEd for the purpose of its comparison, are about 100 households whose dwellings are about the same size as ours. Those annoying efficient neighbors are the “most efficient 20 percent” of that group, though at least for last month, we were efficient neighbors for other people, without even trying.

One more datum: From January to November 2015, we used 5,351 kWh, down from 6,125 kWh during the same 11 months in 2014. Also how this happened, I couldn’t say. According to the trove of weather data that’s the Weather Underground, there were 799 cooling degree days in 2014 and 806 in 2015 (as measured at O’Hare, which is close enough).

That means ’15 was a little warmer, but not much, which is an important consideration, since running the AC is the main contributor to high household electric usage over a year. I know that because the handy ComEd graph of our electric usage throughout 2015 (also in the letter) spikes like the Matterhorn in July-August-September.

Never mind flying cars and all that imagined future hooey. The future (that is, now) should have included that business about “too cheap to meter.”

Pit of Winter, and No Place to Toboggan

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According to online sources, the temperature outside as I post is zero degrees Fahrenheit, with small negative numbers expected in the near future. Tomorrow will see highs in the positive single digits. So here we are, in the pit of winter.

Twenty-eight Januaries ago I was tramping around at one of the Du Page County Forest Preserves, maybe Blackwell Forest Preserve in Warrenville. I used drive out from the city periodically to visit a friend in Warrenville, usually on a Saturday. During the warm months, I’d help him tend his large garden, receiving a share of the produce.

In the winter, I forget what we did, besides watch videos and — on January 23, 1988 — visit a snow-covered forest preserve as the snow fell. I had my camera, and it was during a period when I was taking black-and-white pictures. We happened across a closed toboggan run.

Du Page County Jan 1988I can’t pin it down now, or rather don’t want to spend much time at it, but I’m fairly certain that the local forest preserves closed their handful of toboggan runs sometime not long before I took the picture. Probably it was the expense, or the liability, or both.

Holiday Interlude

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Another Christmas and New Year’s Day have come and gone. A mostly pleasant time. Here’s Christmas morning.

Christmas Day 2015The girls opened their presents and ate their chocolate, and proceeded to spend the day with electronic entertainment, and some reading as well. That’s what I did too. The dog didn’t care a whit about Christmas, as far as we could tell. Just another day of eating and smelling and barking and lying around, ignoring strictly human notions. That’s probably just as well.

On the morning of the 28th, sleet came pouring out of the sky. Unfortunately I’d made dentist appointments for the girls for in the early afternoon that day, so that meant a harrowing drive on slick roads, but we made it unscathed.

By the next morning, the streets were clear, but my driveway wasn’t. The covering had a high ice content, meaning a lot of effort to remove, even though it wasn’t particularly thick ice. Just what are we creatures of the tropics doing this close to one of the poles?

I’m Dreaming of a Muddy Christmas

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Actually, no need to dream. Heavy rains every few days mean puddles and mud for the Yuletide landscape. Such is this year.

Merry Christmas to all. Back to posting around January 3, 2016, with any luck.

How did it happen that more than half of the second decade of the 21st century is over already? That it’s been nearly 40 years since “Disco Duck” was on the charts? Or, in a more personal vein, that it’s been nearly 30 years since I looked at the Chicago skyline from Grant Park and thought, I’d like to live here. That it’s been nearly 20 years since we agreed, Let’s have that baby. That it’s been nearly 10 years since I sent a postcard of Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Alberta from near there, and my entire message was Oh My God.

Enough of that. In a more forward-looking mode, we had lunch on Saturday at a restaurant on Southport Ave. before we went to the Music Box, and a couple wheeled in two very small children in a two-kid stroller. “You know,” I said to Lilly and Ann, “those kids might live to see the 22nd century. Maybe not, but it’s entirely possible.” Food for thought to go along with regular food.

An El Niño Winter?

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Some years, December comes in with the kind of snow we had before Thanksgiving. This year, rain as November ended and December began. El Niño?

I can’t pretend to understand exactly how that works, but I do defer to NOAA on the matter of the impact of El Niño on North America: “Seasonal outlooks generally favor below-average temperatures and above-median precipitation across the southern tier of the United States, and above-average temperatures and below-median precipitation over the northern tier of the United States.”

As a northern-tier location, so far we haven’t had below-median precipitation, but it has been warmer than usual. Suits me.

Other marks of the season, recently spotted in the neighborhood, include creeping Christmas lights. They started appearing just before Thanksgiving and have accelerated since. I expect a rush to put them up next weekend. The neighbors across the street have them up already. A few blocks away, someone did the full Griswold on their house, as a few people do: hundreds of lights everywhere, inflatables, glowing Santas, reindeer, elves, “Nutcracker Suite” characters, and a Nativity setup that might be visible from space.

It’s enough so far that I brought the lights in from the garage, for testing. That makes me ask all over again, how can simple strings become so tangled? Also, three of the four strings lit again after 11 months or so. One did not wake up, like the woman astronaut in the original Planet of the Apes.

Thanksgiving & The Days After ’15

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On the whole, Thanksgiving outside was gray and rainy, but pleasantly warm for this time of the year. The days afterward were drier but much chillier, though not quite freezing.

Pictured: an all-too-common meal snapshot, in this case most of my Thanksgiving dinner. Note the artless presentation. I did that myself. I don’t remember what the plastic fork was doing there, but I will assert that we used metal utensils.
Thanksgiving chow '15The ham came from a warehouse store, while Lilly prepared the various starches, with Ann’s assistance. She combined four or five different cheeses for the macaroni and cheese. It isn’t Thanksgiving without that, she said, and it was the star attraction of the plate. For those who fret about such things, there was a green item on the menu, too: green beans, which didn’t make into the picture, but did make it into my stomach.

Once again, Martinelli’s sparkling cider was the main drink — original and cranberry/apple — though we also opened a bottle of wine we bought at a winery near Traverse City in 2007. I’d post the name of the wine, but that would involve going out to the refrigerator in the garage, where it’s now stored, and reading the label. It was a pretty good Riesling.

Some people shop on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That’s never been my ambition. My ambition is to do as close to nothing that day as possible. Days like that are very rare. This year I almost achieved it. Almost, but not quite.

Which reminds me of this exchange in Office Space.

Michael Bolton: You were supposed to come in on Saturday. What were you doing?

Peter Gibbons: Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.

On Saturday, we watched Vancouver Asahi, a Japanese movie on TV about the baseball team of that name, composed of Japanese-Canadian players during its heyday in the 1930s, when there used to be a Japantown in Vancouver. Not bad on the whole, though about 30 minutes too long. It also had the virtue of being about something I’d never heard of before.

After the movie ended, at about 11:30 in the evening, I went out on the deck and could see Orion to the south, parading across a nice clear sky. Never mind the solstice. Winter’s here.

More Moo Goo Gai Pan

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Back again on November 29. A good Thanksgiving to all. The snow, which has been melting all day, ought to be gone by then, leaving cold mud. But snow will be back before long. Never mind the snows of yesteryear. There’s always plenty more this year.

Sand, as I’ve noted before, is good for adding traction to icy driveways and sidewalks. Something I’ve learned this year: playground sand isn’t what you want. At freezing temps it tents to stick together, which makes for lousy spreading. Tube sand, which I’ve long used, is the thing.

It’s been 40 years since the original broadcast of “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the episode of The Bob Newhart Show in which Emily’s out of town for Thanksgiving, so Bob spends the holiday with Howard and Jerry and Mr. Carlin watching a football game. They get blotto and order an excess of Moo Goo Gai Pan from a Chinese restaurant.

How much pretend-drunk comedy is there now? Not much, I think, though I don’t spend a lot of time watching sitcoms any more. I’ll leave it to others to tease out the social implications of that. It’s enough for me to note that there’s no equivalent of Foster Brooks on prime time that I know of. Then again, there’s not really any such thing as prime time any more.

Post-Thanksgiving Days of a Previous Decade

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Sunday, Nov 22, 2015

Most years the first snow’s a light dusting, but this year full-blown winter precipitation started falling late on Friday and well into Saturday, leaving us with about a foot of wet, heavy snow. Wet probably because it was barely cold enough to freeze, but it did stick to every tree and bush. Turns out the official amount on Saturday — 11.2 inches at O’Hare, where the NWS takes its Chicago-area measurement — was the most for a November snowfall since 1895.

Nov 21, 2015Friday, Nov 24, 2006

Another major holiday come and gone. Now it’s Buy Nothing Day. So far, I’ve bought nothing today, unless you count electricity, natural gas, phone service, etc. I don’t think even the most dyed-in-the-wool believer in the “America as World Pig” model of global economics would shut off his utilities for the day after Thanksgiving.

I’m no purist when it comes to Buy Nothing Day, since I have a strong suspicion I’m going to invest in fried poultry in a few hours, to feed the whelps and my nephew Sam, who’s visiting from Cincinnati. No whelp he, since he’s 23.

Yesterday’s feast was reasonably conventional: big bird, smashed spuds, various breads, even that all-North American berry, cranberries. The only peculiarities involved Sam, who is peculiar in his eating habits and ate a species of Polish sausage instead of bird meat; and our choice of dessert: a pie of no sort, but instead cream puffs.

Lilly, who just turned 9, ate as heartily as the rest of us, but at about 9 pm last night threw everything up in the vicinity of the downstairs toilet. No one else here was afflicted in the same way, not yet. Such are the stuff of special holiday memories. She felt better this morning, fortunately. [But the virus wasn’t through with us.]

Wednesday, Nov 29, 2006

Early this morning, after I’d woken up once to hear the rain on the roof, I returned to the imaginal realm and dreamed of flying – not too common a variety of dream for me, but it happens occasionally. Flying as if I were a kite, tethered to a moving train far, far below through a broad prairie landscape. That was only a part of an elaborate, vivid dream, the likes of which I only have a few times a year. I have plenty of other dreams, of course, pleasant or anxious, but more pedestrian. (The Japanese verb associated with dreaming translates as “see.” I like that. I saw a dream last night.)

Friday, Dec 1, 2006

A foot of snow today, and you’d think that would quiet things down outside. It did, for a while, since the blanket of snow muffled the streets and closed the airports beginning a little after midnight. I was up briefly at 3 am or so and wished I could leave the windows open, since the traffic noise was gone. But as soon as the sun came up this morning, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr went the snowblowers. And traffic started again.