Posts Tagged ‘Winter’
Not Subtle
Mother nature wasn’t subtle about bringing on winter weather this year. The pleasure of warm fall days was a rare occurrence. Now it seems as though harsh, biting cold temperatures are the norm.
Our neighborhood was on the edge of accumulating snow on Tuesday night, which made the first 10 miles of my commute on Wednesday morning a little tricky. The ol’ Subaru didn’t want to stop at the first three intersections of my drive, sliding on the slippery layer of new-fallen snow. Luckily, at the early hour of my departure, there was little other traffic sharing the road.
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Delilah was thrilled with the new snow coating, dragging her nose to scrape up some of the precious white stuff. That double-layer coat she wears year-round is a lot more comfortable now than it was in the summer. No wonder she is so happy. It’s finally her weather again.
Last night there was a halo of ice crystals around the moon that evoked memories of the sun dogs that form on the coldest of winter days.
Cold like we are getting this year is a lot more intense when it shows up as quick as it has and we haven’t had time to comfortably acclimatize.
It’s beginning to look and feel a lot like winter. Brrr. Wish I could remember where I stashed my favorite cold-weather gloves the last time I used them eight months ago.
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October Snow
I’d like to act all surprised over all the snowflakes flying this early in October, but we’ve had so many days of warnings this was coming that it’s something of a feigned surprise.
How can there be global warming? There is snow falling in October!
For those of you who think this way, go talk with the people suffering more wildfire calamity in California today or any of the record-breaking typhoon/cyclone/hurricane intensities over every ocean on the planet with each successive formation.
I’m sure these incidents and all the melting glaciers and polar ice are just a coincidence.
I grabbed a screenshot of the Weatherbug radar image with our location southeast of the Twin Cities showing the spread of falling snow from Buffalo to Beldenville.
The wintery weather has me thinking I should have already blown out the water line to the labyrinth and drained all of our garden hoses. Cyndie reported the water for the chickens was frozen this morning. At least she had already installed the plexiglass window panes over the metal hardware cloth in each of the openings earlier this week.
It’s probably a good thing the Twins got booted from the baseball playoffs so they don’t have to play games in this kind of weather.
We’ve got a fire in the fireplace and I am gazing out at the deck collecting flakes with trees full of leaves as a backdrop. It makes me think of a certain Halloween blizzard (1991) for the drastic cross-mixing of fall and winter.
Of course, I also have a vivid memory of the Halloween night it was so uncharacteristically warm I went for a long bike ride to enjoy the late taste of summer.
Luckily, today our location won’t get much in the way of an accumulation from this system, but it definitely serves as an attention-getter for what lies ahead.
Much as I love winter weather, I’m in no hurry to get there this year.
It would be so nice to have time to actually finish the deck resurfacing project before snow shows up for good.
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Necessity Invents
I was running out of options, in regard to clearing snow. In addition to the advancing drifts narrowing the bottom half of our driveway, we are facing the possibility of more heavy, wet snow this coming weekend. If I don’t open up some space, the next snowfall would really be a pain to clear.
Necessity being the mother of invention, I needed to figure out a way to open more width along the rise where the drifting occurs.
It was tedious, but using the most available tool –our Grizzly plow– I decided to make a series of 45-degree pushes in little “bites” to move the bank out wider. In the first 20 feet, I got stuck twice, and needed to shovel my way out.
Getting hung up like that was not going to cut it, if I was going to finish this project all at once. I needed to alter my technique.
I decided to skip ahead to focus on the narrowest section first. If getting stuck was going to keep me from getting very far, I should at the very least widen the narrowest portion of the plowed driveway.
I can’t say it was any particular savvy on my part, other than recognizing what was happening, but my switch to a new spot arbitrarily reversed my direction so that I was cutting into the snow bank from the opposite angle. In so doing, I ended up pushing first with the skinny side of the plow blade.
It quickly became apparent that this orientation facilitated backing out, while coming from the other direction was getting me hung up on the wide end of the blade.
I didn’t get stuck once finishing the rest of that whole southern stretch of the driveway.
John – 1; Drifts – 0.
I win!
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Endless Loop
Our weather is like a broken record, in the sense of a vinyl record, where the needle gets stuck, jumping back to play the same sound over and over. I almost titled this post, “Broken Record,” but I figured most people younger than me might miss the connotation.
“Needle gets stuck?!”
Our weather is like an endless loop of snow and cold, with barely a break between.
Delilah is showing increasing weariness over the deep snow and brutally cold temperatures. I had to cut short our afternoon walk on Sunday because her feet were bothering her. She would walk a short distance and then lay down to tend to her paws while I waited.
It became very clear that she was happy with my decision to reverse direction and head straight back to the house.
She allowed me to pause for a picture of the labyrinth, covered in an unblemished winter blanket. The path is impossible to discern.
Even though it hadn’t snowed all day yesterday, as I approached home on my commute from work, there seemed to be a surprising amount of snow in the air.
The wind was blowing last Friday’s fresh powder aloft. Is that a big deal? It was when I reached our driveway. A drift was forming on a large portion of the southern banks of the already narrow opening.
Reminds me of the predicament I was managing last week in the wee hours of the morning.
It’s an endless loop.
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Beautiful Outside
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Sure, it’s cold outside this morning, but in the days after half a foot of fresh powdery snow has fallen, it’s also really beautiful.
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Ahhh, winter.
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Good Friends
While clearing snow off the deck to allow full access to the grill and make a path to the wood shed, I spied our sunflower over the railing. It obviously looked a little worse for the wear, but seeing it triggered welcome memories of summer.
We needed more wood because our weekend plan involved hanging out with friends around the fire. It was even foretold in a fortune that appeared in a cookie Cyndie and I split.
Why, yes, we will! And we were! George and Anneliese came yesterday to spend the night. Cyndie cooked up a meal of grilled pork chops with pineapple that seemed to echo summertime more than it did the depth of winter we are currently enduring.
Yesterday’s fresh five-inches of sugary powder snow fell with heavy intensity for most of the afternoon. Today dawned a picture postcard perfect snowy landscape.
Last night, we mostly ignored the snow and celebrated joyful memories of the months George and Anneliese lived in our basement. The boys pulled off a come-from-behind victory in CrossCrib and Anneliese won the nightcap card game of Bikini, like she always seems to do.
At a time when Cyndie and I are contemplating significant changes to life here, it was extra special to have a chance to relive some of the precious times we have enjoyed along the way.
Good friends are an essential part of most of our best memories, aren’t they?
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Winter Evening
Although February was a difficult month of winter weather for our region, I’ll mark today’s change of calendar with an image of the beauty that comes along with weeks of heavy snow.
Thank you to Cyndie for capturing and sharing this scene.
Happy March !
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Successive Challenges
Never assume. Sunday night, I neglected to go outside to verify the degree of drifting in the driveway, after the day of strong wind. From the house, we could see the tops of trees swaying dramatically, but by afternoon, there was very little in the way of obvious snow still being swept up by the gusts.
We stayed in and watched the Oscars.
It turns out, drifts grow even when the blowing snow isn’t visibly obvious.
I got up at my usual work-day zero-dark-thirty and did my routine of planks and stretches, then dressed and headed out the door into the predawn darkness.
From the house to just beyond the hay shed, there was no change from when I plowed the day before. As I climbed the hill before the road, the cleared portion of driveway narrowed.
Drifts can be really deceiving. Driving toward them, it’s difficult to discern whether it will be soft, or packed solid. It can also be hard to tell whether they are going to be higher than the clearance of the car.
Since my Crosstrek has been performing so superbly thus far this winter, I forged ahead in hopes of breaking apart the drifts just enough so Cyndie would be able to drive her car out after me. She needed to leave early to lead some training for staff at a school in St. Paul.
It turned out that the drifts had grown significantly since I plowed, they were packed into a very firm density, and they were just tall enough to rub the bottom of my car. Cyndie would never be able to get out in her car, even if I broke through all the way to the road.
Didn’t really matter. I couldn’t break through. Near the top of the hill, forward progress stopped. I tried rocking forward and back, but the car-length I achieved backward only moved me deeper into the drift. I got the car stuck.
I would need to plow. Of all times to be forced to plow, this was really inconvenient. It was dark, I wanted to get on the road to beat traffic, and the air temperature was -5°F with a windchill around -35°F. I was dressed for work, not for being outside.
I intended to make this quick, but circumstances did not allow. The ATV wouldn’t start. The battery was sapped by the cold temperature. I popped the seat off and found the battery was covered by a mouse nest made out of pilfered bits of fiberglass insulation. Nice.
The battery charger was inside the frozen truck, so I had to wrestle with getting the doors open and trying to unwind the inflexible cables. With the jump, I got the ATV started and headed out to clean up just the bare minimum to get our cars through.
The drifts were too dense for the relative light weight of the ATV to push through. I ended up lifting the blade and “paddling” forward on the deep treads of the winter tires, just to break up the drifts. When I got down to the road, I could see that someone had driven by and smashed through a huge drift by our mailbox.
The road was almost as bad as our driveway.
I successfully made several difficult trips back and forth over the hill, each time trying to move a fraction more snow with the blade, but I was a long way from plowing it clean enough for Cyndie’s car to make it out.
Then the cable that lifts the plow blade broke. At that point, there was nothing else left to go wrong.
I blame the frigid temperature. It adds difficulty to everything you try to do. At least the sunrise provided an entertaining backdrop.
I was close enough to being done when the cable broke that Cyndie and I were able to shovel a path out of what remained of the busted up drift. The clearing we achieved was so narrow, I could hear the side of her car rubbing the snow as she drove through the skinniest section, but we both made it out in the end!
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Snow Everywhere
This story holds no surprises. There was so much snow to be cleared from our driveway and paths and roof top, that it consumed our attention from the moment we woke up yesterday. We are now dealing with the most snow since we moved here in 2012.
We are devising new ways to pile snow, finding new places to push it, and sacrificing non-essential spaces that were previously cleared. When you can no longer lift it over the pile, you start pushing it up against the pile.
Preparations actually started last week, when we received around 9 inches on Wednesday. I had to plow in such a way as to make room for what we already knew was coming this weekend.
Saturday, we tried building a snow screen out of the netting of an old hay feeder bag and three t-posts, to soften the blow our mailbox suffers when the township plow zooms past.
It didn’t work.
Well, maybe it worked a little bit. The mailbox still popped off the base, but now that I think about it, instead of flying far into the ditch, it just flopped over behind the post.
It didn’t start snowing until after dark Saturday night, but Cyndie said it was coming down pretty heavily when she took Delilah out for her last walk of the night. When I got up in the wee hours of the morning, the wind was whipping the snow to the point it completely covered the screen door to the deck so I couldn’t guess how much new snow had fallen to that point.
By the time daylight arrived, new snow had stopped falling. The remaining flakes still airborne were being blown by the gale force winds, occasionally forming mini-tornado spirals, and carving sweeping waves of curving drifts.
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I’m pretty sure we are going to remember the record-setting amount of snow that fell in February, 2019 for many years.
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Relative Something 