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.
Miserable cold, windy day, the kind of day that has you chase your trash cans down the street early in the morning, after crossing parts of your driveway that threaten to slip you up. While groggy, because recent days have been such an intense combination of rain, snow, and meltage that your trusty sump pump works very hard to remove water from the lower reaches of your house — and decides to noisily kick in just after midnight. Keeping you (me) awake long past the point at which you (I) wanted to be awake.
But at least I heard about an historic event today, something that hasn’t happened in almost 600 years; rarer than a Transit of Venus, though the resignation of a pope could be more common if the popes wanted it to be. Naturally, that sent me to reference works to look up the likes of Gregory XII, the last pontiff to voluntarily kick off the shoes of the fisherman. That was during the Great Schism, something you don’t hear much about in the news (it’s old news, after all).
The fine Historical Atlas of the World (Barnes & Noble Everyday Handbooks, 1970) has a map called the Great Schism 1378-1417 on half a page, and it’s instructive in the way maps can be. Some areas are purple: “Adherents to the pope in Rome,” such as England, all the Scandinavian kingdoms, Hungary, Poland, and the Italian states. In green, “Adherents of the pope in Avignon,” including Castile, Aragon, France, Scotland, and the Kingdom of Naples. The sprawling, non-centralized Holy Roman Empire is in gold, listed as a region of “Undecided Allegiance.” No surprise there, but Portugal is also undecided. I don’t remember the reason for that, but maybe they were trying to annoy their fellow Iberians in Castile and Aragon.
So who’s to be the next pope? Does Benedict XVI want to be alive to influence the choice? Perhaps to push for a “nephew” for the job? No, papal intrigue isn’t quite what it used to be. What about the next papal name? I still think Sixtus the Sixth would be a good choice.
Heavy snow this evening, but it didn’t rise to the level of blizzard. For one thing, there was practically no wind. First rain, than big snow flakes fell almost straight down. Nothing like the promised blizzard in the Northeast, which the Weather Channel is trying to name after a fictional submarine captain or a spunky animated clown fish.
Name winter storms? No, if it’s a real corker, the likes of the “Great Blizzard of 1888” or the “Armistice Day Blizzard,” or the “Blizzard of 1978” will do. Trying to name a winter storm like a hurricane is just the Weather Channel drifting a little more toward infotainment. I’m with the National Weather Service on that score: no names for winter storms.
And speaking of which: no to the new cat Monopoly token. There’s a dog token, of course, but dogs are loyal creatures who will follow you around the board. Cats will lounge around Free Parking all day, waiting to be fed. I’m old enough to remember to man-on-horseback and cannon tokens, which shouldn’t have been retired either. When it comes to weather nomenclature and Monopoly, I’m a mossbacked reactionary.
At last, snow worthy of the name. Or at least in the North. I’ve seen enough Northern winters (or, enough already), so I think I can call this one the first real snow of the winter — looks like an early December snow. Odd.
The deck, early February 2013.
The snowfall also meant the first snow shoveling of the season, hearing the rumble of trucks and their flashing lights entering your room in the middle of the night, and the buzz of snowblowers. I still do the snow manually.
This morning I looked out and saw puddles of water. I was expecting ice. I didn’t bother checking any weather reports last night, so I was surprised. Actually, I’m still surprised, since this afternoon it felt like a post-rain day in March — not warm, but not freezing cold either, and a lot of soggy ground.
Ann’s 10th birthday is later this week, but she elected to mark the occasion on Saturday with some friends, cake and ceremonial candle extinguishing. Some of Lilly’s friends were around too, mostly to eat some food.
Have the last ten years passed quickly? Like the wink of an eye, or another cliche of choice? No, not really. It seems like quite a while ago, because it was.
Ten years ago: “I got back to the hospital at about 7:30 am, and things were moving along nicely, but I hadn’t missed the main event. Before long, though, the show was on. At about t-minus 10 minutes (in retrospect, I can call it that) the doctor asked me if we knew it was a boy or girl. I said no. Do you have any names? Yes, Ann and Alexander. Duly noted. And so the baby came — hard to find a verb here that really describes it — pushed out, squeezed forth, slipped through bloodily, noisily, suddenly. ‘It’s baby Ann,’ said the doc, which was a nice thing for her to do. When Lilly was born, there was much hubbub, the view was obscured, and no one mentioned gender until I asked.”
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.
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.)
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.
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!
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.