Tag Archives: unpleasant weather

A Short Visit to Wheaton

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Rain again Sunday night, to add to the slosh on the ground left by Saturday’s downpours. No doubt about it, the weekend was wet. Here’s the view of the water from my car on Saturday, as I waited in a shopping center parking lot.

April 30, 2016Wheaton’s a prosperous suburb and the county seat of DuPage County, Ill., and easily accessible from where we live by surface streets. We used to go there with some frequency to visit the small but pleasant Cosley Zoo, which is operated by the Wheaton Park District, especially before recessionary pressures (apparently) inspired a new admission fee for non-Wheatonites, ca. 2010. These days there’s less demand among the younger residents of the house, who aren’t so young any more, for zoo visits.

We’d mulled going further afield on Saturday, but the persistent rain and cool temps nixed the idea of any outdoor destinations, so we headed to Wheaton. Not to the zoo, but to see the DuPage County Historical Museum, which we’ve passed by but never visited.

But first things first: lunch. I’m happy to report that the diminutive Mai Thai Cafe at Main St. and Wesley St. is still in business, and still services good Thai food at popular prices. Spicier than some other North American Thai joints, too, enough that there’s a sign posted at the restaurant warning customers to think twice about ordering the spiciest versions of its dishes.

Not far to the west on Wesley St., in Wheaton’s pleasant shopping district, we spotted a post-accident scene of the kind that makes you wonder, how did that happen, exactly? (Like this one.)

Wesley St. Wheaton April 30, 2016The car on the sidewalk’s clearly been smacked from behind, but it doesn’t look like it plowed through any of the planters on the sidewalk to get there. Maybe it jumped onto the sidewalk just so, narrowly missing the planters. Or did it back up onto the sidewalk somehow? If so, why, after being rear-ended? I didn’t inspect the scene closely, so I’m certainly missing an essential piece of the puzzle.

I took the shot from about a half block away, under an awning, because it was raining. Three or four other people were taking pictures from there as well. That’s the early 21st century for you: an era of easy photography that often doesn’t clarify anything.

End of the Week Debris

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Rain, I don’t mind. Miserable cold at the end of April, that doesn’t seem right. That’s what we have, with the promise of slightly less miserable cold during the early days of May.

Here’s a picture of my nephew Dees, taken (probably) by one of his bandmates while they were in Atlanta. I doubt that they’d mind me posting it.DeesAJA fellow I don’t know, who seems to be an Englishman — or at least an English-speaker — living in Germany, left me a message at BTST, asking whether I knew the exact location of the Goethe Institut in Lüneburg. He’d attended classes there the same summer I did in 1983, though in August, and if you Google “Goethe Institut, Lüneburg,” I’m the first hit. He must have found me that way. Guess not many other people have posted about their fond memories of the place.

He had the chance to visit Lüneburg again and wanted to see the school. Sadly, I had to tell him I didn’t know the address after all this time. It isn’t on Google Maps, so my suspicion is that it’s long closed. I vaguely remember hearing about plans to close it, even when I was there, but wouldn’t swear to anything.

Apparently he made it to Lüneburg in late April and didn’t see the school. He did find that it was snowing.

If I remember correctly, that’s the handsome Lüneburg Rathaus. But I never saw it during a light snow.

Prickly Dark Clouds

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The skies over the northwestern suburbs were particularly dramatic on the evening of April 25, 2016. Around 6 p.m. I prepared the dog for her walk, naturally one of her very favorite things to do, but as soon as we got out the door, rain fell. Dark clouds had moved in suddenly and were making noise, too. We went back inside, the dog very reluctantly.

The rain was over and it was partly cloudy again in 15 minutes or so. I took her out for the delayed walk, but after about 20 minutes dark clouds returned and made more noise, though much of the sky was still blue. We got home without incident a few minutes later. The sky toward the northwest looked like this.

Clouds! Don't strike me, Zues!Toward the north-northeast, like this.

More clouds!Pictures don’t do them justice. They were mighty fine cloud forms. As it turned out, not really storm clouds, just a mite prickly. Those came later in the evening.

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.

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?

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.

Sort of a Blizzard ’15

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Going into yesterday’s snow event, it was simply going to be a winter storm. At some point during the storm, officialdom started calling it a blizzard. I’m skeptical. A lot of snow fell, but it took all night and day, and some wind blew, but it wasn’t a howling fury. That’s what a blizzard is to me: howling fury. Like in ’99 or ’11.

I went outside twice yesterday and once this morning for snow removal. So it the pain-in-the-butt, risk-your-heart sense, I guess it was a blizzard. The Tribune tells me that “As of about 7 a.m. Monday, O’Hare International Airport had a total of 19.3 inches of snow, making it the fifth-largest multiday storm on record, according to the National Weather Service.”

The snow certainly made mighty piles. On my deck, some of them.

Feb 2, 2015Also, the ornamental bridge is just as buried this time as in 2011. (Has it really be four years since that happened? Four years to the day, in fact, before the latest storm?)

Feb 2, 2015The wind sculpted some odd forms. On the other side of our roof, there wasn’t much snow cover at all.

Feb 2, 2015It looks like you can’t open the door with our hitting the snow lip, but it’s hanging far enough away that the door doesn’t touch it.

Snow in Osaka

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Snow throughout the night and into the day today. Not a blizzard exactly, just a steady build up with some wind. Just when our driveway was more-or-less clear from previous non-blizzard buildup. But at least it’s February. The best thing about that is that it’s not January any more.

The view of the back yard around noon today. Much more snow was to come.

Feb 1 2015 Dog in snowOsaka’s hot and humid much of the year, with mild winters. A gas-burning space heater was all I needed to heat my small apartment in the winter. But it did get cold. Early in 1994, Osaka got snow. Like the San Antonio snow event 21 years earlier, it was novel enough so that I took pictures.

Osakasnow94.1Just a coating. The white building in the background was my apartment building, known as the Sunshine Mansion. The windows of my third-story unit are mostly obscured in this shot by the twin utility poles, but I had a fairly good view.

Osakasnow94.2A few blocks away is the Nagai crossing of the JR Hanwa Line. The partial rainbow marks the site of a pachinko parlor. Behind that was a grocery store I went to often (pachinko, never).

Osakasnow94.3Follow those tracks far enough, and you get to Wakayama. In the other direction is the much closer Tennoji terminus, which is in the city of Osaka. But I rarely took the Hanwa line. Not far away was the Nagai station of the Midosuji Line of the Osaka subway system, which is how I usually got around.

Millions Will Freeze!

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The hunger for eyeballs – which sounds like a concept from some zombie movie – is leading to ridiculous web site headlines. Then again, draw-’em-in headlines goes all the way back to yellow journalism. This from Weather.com this morning, in the wake of a completely ordinary January cold front pushed that through much of North America.

DANGEROUS ARCTIC BLAST IMPACTING 190 MILLION: IT COULD FEEL LIKE 50 BELOW!

50 F below, if you happen to be in Bismarck or Bemidji or some such; a circumstance local residents would call “Wednesday.” Granted, it’s probably fairly cold in the South as well – 26 F above in Nashville this morning, for example, but it’s winter there, too. This event didn’t even count as a blizzard.

Anyway, I just wanted to check our local temp at about 9:30, which turned out to be 0 F. Not to worry, it’ll be back in the upper 20s by Sunday, which will seem positively toasty. But not toasty enough to melt our modest coating of snow.

I will say that if scroll down far enough at Weather.com – past most of the click-bait stories – you’ll come to a graph that details the apparent course of the sun throughout the day. It tells me, for instance, that solar noon today was at 11:59 am, and that sunset came at 4:37 pm. Even better, it demarks civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight – 5:09, 5:43, and 6:17 pm, respectively. Also, moonrise and moonset: rise is at 7:25 pm tonight.

I probably won’t be out for any of these events, since it isn’t going to get above zero today, but it’s nice to know when I can track them without going outside.