Tag Archives: unpleasant weather

That Cold Blood Moon

Posted on by

It was too cold this morning to drag myself outside and document the snow clinging to the April grass and trees. Why bother anyway? It looked more-or-less like this.

Actually a little less snow coated the ground this time than seven years ago, at least as recorded by my pictures. There wasn’t quite as much sticking to the branches, and none on the street. In any case, except for shadowy spots, all the snow vanished in the afternoon sun, pale and weak as it was.

Missed the early morning Blood Moon, as some headline writers seem to be calling the latest lunar eclipse. They’re nice to see, but not worth getting up at 3 in the morning, especially when it was snowing when you went to bed a few hours earlier. It’s a hard enough sell when it’s merely cold outside, as it also was this morning.

I didn’t miss the season opener of Mad Men, which apparently got low ratings. As a casual viewer of TV, the last thing I care about is ratings, especially for a show that’s going to end on a schedule anyway. It was a decent episode, neither the best nor the worst of the series, and as usual seemed to inspire a lot of commentary, so I won’t really add to that total, even in my small way.

Writing about television in general seems to inspire a body of ridiculous, or at least pointless, writing. Not long ago I saw a headline something like this: “Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead Occupy the Same Universe.” The only reasonable reaction to that is, who cares?

Winter Strikes Back: Sorry!

Posted on by

Here on our small patch of North American earth, we have a few hardy flowers, some buds, and a little green in the grass, along with a few bugs. Saturday proved to be as warm as advertised (70s F.), cloudy sometimes, sunny at other times. Yuriko and I took a pleasant walk at the Spring Valley Nature Preserve.

On Sunday, the warm air held the promise of rain all day, but it held off long enough to allow me to replace a dodgy hinge on our wooden gate and do other things around the back yard, such as pick up the wintertime debris that collects here and there. Lilly and I sat around on the deck for a while, and I could feel the air cooling down. In the span of about half an hour, we lost 10 degrees.

Today, cold and snow. So cold that it stuck, as of the early evening.

On Saturday evening, Ann wanted to play a board game. She plays more video games than any other kind of game, so I thought it was a good idea to oblige her. We don’t have that many games, though, and decided that Monopoly and Risk would involve more time than we wanted to commit. So we played Sorry! Lilly and a friend of hers played, too. Not the most engaging board game in the world, but it has its moments.

BoardGameGeek (“gaming unplugged since 2000”) mentions a Sorry! alternate that sounds interesting: “Sorry! can be made more of a strategic game (and more appealing to adults) by dealing five cards to each player at the start of the game and allowing the player to choose which card he/she will play each turn. In this version, at the end of each turn, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace the card that was played, so that each player is always working from five cards.”

Someday I need to teach Ann and Lilly the rudiments of Risk. Maybe they’ll never play it, but maybe they will. Once or twice a year in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I played Risk with some of my high school friends, and I have fond memories of the games. Eventually, we got to know each other’s strategic thinking pretty well, such as the fact that one of us (and he knows who he is) inevitably took the offense. That is, attack! Outnumbered? Attack! Surrounded? Attack! Just do it! Sometimes it worked out for him, usually not.

There’s Snow on Them Thar Suburban Lawns

Posted on by

The only reason I’m using a “them thar” headline today is because one of my editors – again – removed one of my headlines with a “There’s X in Them Thar Y.”  Sure, it’s a hoary old cliché, but it’s got an honorable pedigree, at least if its association with the antebellum gold rush in Dahlonega, Georgia, is true. It’s been removed from my articles more than once. Here, no one can remove it but me, no matter how silly it is.

Anyway, we woke up to snow this morning, the day of the equinox. (“First day of spring,” they say on TV and the radio. Oh, really?) It was a light coating, and by 10 a.m. had already started to melt, except in the shadows, and by afternoon most of it was long gone. So it wasn’t the serious snow of the days of the polar vortexes. Still, the weekend is forecast to be plenty winter-like.

I got a scanner in 2000 when I bought my first iMac, since it was thrown in with that machine for only $10. I scanned a lot of things for a number of years. Including items I have no idea why I thought they were worth scanning. Such as:

LaMasRicaI have an interest in package art — my roommate and I maintained a “Package Art Gallery” in a closet in our dorm during my junior year in college — but I don’t know that this one is all that interesting. (My favorite from the Package Art Gallery was a muffin mix that promised the muffins would be “the most very blueberry anythings you ever ate.” We hung items, with thumbtacks, for verbiage as much as design.)

A few child-produced items are in the scan collection.

LillyPaintFeb02One of Lilly’s, according to the label, dating from 2002. And of course there are scans of the kids themselves, such as this one from some years ago, which may be among the last pictures I took with a film camera.

Lilly-AnnFinally, a few scanned items from nature. The Acorn, for instance.

AcornWhich somehow reminds me of this 7-baht Thai postage stamp.

AcorncapI assume that’s the king of Thailand. I’m not sure that I got the stamp in Thailand — 7 baht seems like a small denomination  — so maybe it came with a grab-bag of cheap stamps I bought once.

Anna Maria Alberghetti in a Wintry Mix, Honey

Posted on by

Another day above freezing. That’s a good thing, except for the current forecast. The following is direct from the National Weather Service, which is worthy of respect for its accuracy, but also the fact that it doesn’t fix cute names to winter storms. The NWS put out this “Special Statement” for my part of the country early this evening.

RAIN AND EVEN SOME THUNDERSTORMS WILL DEVELOP ACROSS NORTHERN ILLINOIS LATER TONIGHT. HOWEVER… TEMPERATURES ACROSS FAR NORTHERN ILLINOIS… MAINLY ALONG AND NORTH OF INTERSTATE 88… [we’re north of I-88 by a few miles] MAY REMAIN COLD ENOUGH TONIGHT FOR THIS PRECIPITATION TO BEGIN AS A WINTRY MIX OF SNOW… SLEET OR FREEZING RAIN BEFORE MUCH WARMER TEMPERATURES ARRIVE THURSDAY MORNING.

DUE TO THE FACT THAT THE PRECIPITATION COULD FALL AT A HEAVY RATE LATE TONIGHT…THIS COULD RESULT IN SOME SNOW OR ICE ACCUMULATIONS ACROSS PORTIONS OF THE AREA BY DAYBREAK THURSDAY… POSSIBLY IMPACTING THE MORNING COMMUTE.

CURRENTLY IT APPEARS THAT A COUPLE INCHES INCHES OF SNOW MAY ACCUMULATE BEFORE THE WINTRY MIX CHANGES TO ALL RAIN EARLY THURSDAY MORNING.

Odd forecast. Deuced odd, it is.

Speaking of odd, it took me nearly 40 years to get the following knock-knock joke, as told by Ted Baxter during the Sept. 13, 1975, episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “Edie Gets Married.”

Not that I’ve been puzzling over it for 40 years. I’d forgotten all about it until today, walking around in the fairly pleasant afternoon air, when I thought, What did that joke about Anna Maria Alberghetti mean? Memory works in mysterious ways.

Just as unlikely, I remembered to look it up when I got home, connecting the joke to “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” which I’d heard before – but (much) more recently than 1975. It was clearly a joke for grownups back then, back when sitcom writers actually wrote jokes for grownups.

A lot of singers have done the song. Fats Domino’s version is here.

Yooper Snow

Posted on by

More snow again last night. What is this, the Upper Peninsula? Which brings to mind a song by Da Yoopers.

My car didn’t actually get stuck today, but I can appreciate the line, “I shovel and I shovel and I shovel that snow.”

Da Yoopers bill themselves as “the #1 hunting, fishing, beer drinking comedy show in America.” They also operate a spot call Da Tourist Trap in Ishpeming, Michigan, up in the UP. If ever I’m there, and it’s a distinct possibility, I’ll buy some postcards or something just to support regional comedy.

Something I didn’t know till I looked it up today: Anatomy of a Murder was filmed in Ishpeming and surrounding area in 1959.

The Snows of Yesteryear Are Still Around

Posted on by

On New Year’s Eve 2013, snow started to fall in northern Illinois. Nothing dramatic, just steady snow that kept coming down, well into the new year. Good thing I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go around the turn of the year. For her part, the dog had to be content to bound around the drifts in the back yard.

Payton Jan 2, 2014It’s been snowing on and off since then, like a slow-motion blizzard. Word is that temps will be significantly subzero tomorrow, as low as it’s been here in 10? 20 years? Both schools have called off classes.

I’ve read that it was down to −27 °F in January 1985, the record low. We’re not expected to break that record tomorrow, but it’ll be unpleasantly close enough. Glad I wasn’t here for that low. Someone who lived through it once told me that when the temperature got back to zero, it felt almost warm.

Armistice Day Snow

Posted on by

I’m the only one that’s going to call yesterday’s snow the Armistice Day Snow of 2013, but I’m peculiar that way. The name echoes the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940, but of course yesterday’s event wasn’t nearly as severe, or unexpected. The Minnesota Historical Society remembers 1940. So does Ludington, Mich.

Or call it the Veterans Day Snow of 2013. It was strange to watch snowflakes blow by and the ground whiten up this early.

The view from the back door.

The dog didn’t mind the snow.

Thought so. She’s an Illinois hound, after all, and her coat has been noticeably thickening in recent weeks.

All the Boards Did Shrink Again

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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?